SEO tools, software licenses, image and video editing programs, email marketing platforms… Practically all of the marketing tools it depends on the online subscriptions. And to manage its acquisition and renewal, a series of Technological tools which greatly help streamline and simplify these recurring payments.
The subscription-based business models have grown by more than 300% in recent yearsaccording to the marketing and advertising consultancy Scopen, and the B2B subscriptions they are no exception. the boom of the subscription economics is such that there is already a name for it: “subscronomics”.
The subscription management dilemma: centralize or decentralize?
In organizations above a certain size it is complicated to centralize the entire process that involves managing purchases and subscriptionsbecause the manager would have to dedicate an enormous amount of time to the procedures of each purchase, renewal and payment for each of the Marketing tools or actions.
Ideally, the best solution is decentralize payment management, giving autonomy to the different teams and professionals to manage and make payments for the tools they use. However, the lack of control and visibility of expenses can lead to overlapping subscriptions, chaos in the justification of expenses and VAT recovery or even cases of internal fraud.
So the key is in decentralize expense management, but without the manager losing control. And this can only be achieved with the help of technological solutions designed for this purpose.
End-to-end management in subscriptions
Solutions for managing purchases and subscriptions organize the procurement flow, including expense request, authorization, payment, and invoice posting. Furthermore, they avoid problems arising from sharing a single corporate card for business expenses (lack of control, inappropriate use, etc.), since these solutions establish a pre-payment approval systemdepending on variables such as the organizational structure or analytical concepts.
Oscar LonchCRO of Inologyenterprise software development company founded in 1986 that has the solution tickelia for the management of company expenses, explains that to avoid the sharing of company cards, the most modern applications such as the one mentioned above “generate a unique virtual card for the approved subscription with the exact amount. Once the payment is made, the card is disabled as a cybersecurity measure and to avoid surcharges.” Automation also means being able set limits and restrictions of usage through alerts, as well as pausing or canceling subscriptions with a single click.
“With the end-to-end management, managers gain greater control and visibility of the expenses made by their team”, adds Llonch, “making sure that no undue expenses are paid or that they exceed the budget”.
The digitized management of purchases and subscriptions also automates the management of invoices, since you only have to drag the documents to the platform and the program reconciles the expenseposting them automatically thanks to the integration with management software or ERP.