How Relying Solely on Your Accounting System for Subscription Management Can Let You Down
As the business and digital landscape changes, more and more businesses are adopting subscription-based models. Whether for SaaS tools, cloud services, or regular vendor agreements, subscriptions have become a staple offering for many organisations.
However, many businesses are making the mistake of managing these subscriptions solely through their accounting systems. While this may seem like an efficient approach, it can actually lead to significant challenges and missed opportunities.
Accounting systems are designed primarily for financial reporting, not for detailed subscription management. They typically provide a broad overview of expenses, but they often lack the granular insights that are necessary for effective subscription management. As a result, businesses often miss out on important details such as renewal dates, upcoming price changes or usage patterns. This lack of visibility can lead to unexpected client queries or underpayments, which can be challenging for the business.
When subscriptions are only tracked through your accounting system, forecasting becomes quite a challenge. Subscriptions often have varying costs, based on usage, user count or tiered services and if your accounting system isn’t capturing these fluctuations in real-time, it can lead to inaccurate financial projections that can result in budgeting issues, cash flow problems and skewed understanding of your true financial position in the market.
Using a dedicated subscription management tool can provide detailed insights into usage patterns, enabling you to optimise the subscriptions that you offer.
Without these crucial insights, businesses may miss out on opportunities to upsell or upscale client subscriptions. An accounting system simply won’t provide the necessary data that is required to make informed decisions about optimising your subscription portfolio.
Renewals are a critical aspect of subscription management, you may be missing crucial client renewal dates and chances to upsell. By having an awareness of renewal dates, businesses can capture key opportunities to expand their offerings and connect further with loyal repeat clients.
Subscription management involves more than just tracking payments, it requires managing contacts, understanding service levels, tracking user access and much more. A generalised accounting system lacks the key functionality to centralise all this information, forcing businesses to rely on disparate tools or manual processes, which can lead to miscommunication, errors and inefficiencies.
While your accounting system is a highly clever and essential tool for managing your finances, it is not sufficient for managing your subscriptions effectively.
The complexities of modern subscription-based services require a more specialised approach, one that offers detailed insights, proactive management features and centralised information. Introducing: Subzapp! We created Subzapp to relieve the headache of ensuring all information is collated together. Subzapp enables you to track your subscriptions in real-time, ensuring no important client opportunities are missed.
Interested in finding out more? Reach out to our friendly team today to book your demo: https://www.subzapp.com/contact/