How to Track Your SaaS Budget in Zylo

Thom McCorkle: Hey, everyone. Thom McCorkle, Director of Product Marketing here at Zylo and it's budget season. In an earlier tip, we talked about how cost allocation can help you build an accurate and complete budget based on your cost per employee, and doing those showbacks by department, division, cost center, et cetera. Well, now we're here to talk about building out that budget. So while you're in build mode, you really need to make sure that you're validating your budget with Zylo data. Make sure that those spend amounts that you're planning for throughout the year are within the realm of reality based on what your actual spend is. Then once your budget's set, Zylo becomes your sidekick to help you monitor your pacing to that budget throughout the year, and that's where app budgets come in.

Thom McCorkle: What is app budgets? It's the ability to track that actual spend alongside your budgeted amount at an application by application level. In addition to your pacing, Zylo is going to highlight where budget overruns are happening or where those are possible, highlighting the need to remediate that with license management or other opportunities. Finally, this is really where spend discovery shines because Zylo's discovering every single transaction for every single application. And categorizing and classifying those apps and that spend, you know exactly down to the dollar and cent how much you're spending for a tool, and you can compare that to your budgeted amount.

Thom McCorkle: So, how do we track that inside of Zylo? Let's jump into a demo. Budgets can be found inside of the Inventory tab inside of Zylo. So when we jump in, we're looking at the budgets for all of the applications inside of our stack. In this case, I actually have this filtered down to IT- owned applications, so I can really quickly and at a glance see how I'm performing for different applications. By tracking my current year and last year's budget, I can see how budgets have changed year over year, and then I can see my fiscal year to date spend as it's pacing to that year. So here I can see I've got a couple of line items right at the top where PagerDuty and Wrike and a few other tools are running over what we had planned for in our budgets. Not a great place that we want to be. So this is a fully customizable view, but some of the first people that I would want to go and talk to are the application owner or the business owner. Maybe I want to talk to the primary cost center that's driving our spend so we can investigate and learn a little bit more about what's going on with this tool.

Thom McCorkle: Zylo also has some pre- built insights inside of the application to help you dig into the different apps that you should be paying attention to. So we have fiscal year- to- date spend where we're exceeding the budgets. If you care more about trending and how apps are changing budgeting year over year, we have largest year- over- year budgets decreases and increases, as well as a sample report to get you started on planning out that budget.

Thom McCorkle: Let's see where our spend is exceeding the most and we can dive in and make sure that we're addressing these tools and putting plans in place. We talked about the renewal life cycle in another tip series. This will be a great place to employ those tactics as those renewals are coming up. License management is also going to be key here, so making sure that you're managing these licenses and if there's any ways for you to go in and re- harvest, do that so you make sure that you're not facing a true up or the need to go and buy more seats.

Thom McCorkle: Okay, that concludes our overview of budgets. We hope your budgeting season is off to a great start. If your budgets are flat or down this year, don't write off the ability to add innovative software solutions throughout the year. Actioning on savings opportunities can free up spend that you can then use to reinvest into your business or strategic projects. And monitoring your budgets is one of those ways to pinpoint those freed up dollars.