Zylo

Would your life be easier if all your SaaS spend data lived in one place - instead of having to jump from system to system? While Zylo has always provided a view into your current SaaS spend, we’re now empowering you with a forward look at your committed spend by integrating with Coupa PO. In this session, we’ll explore this new integration and talk through the power of being able to unite and organize your Invoice, Expense, Purchase Order, and Contract data within one centralized location.

Thom McCorkle

Sr Director of Growth, Acceleration & Operations at Zylo 

Si Harris-Adam

Product Owner at Zylo

In this session, we’ll explore this new integration and talk through the power of being able to unite and organize your Invoice, Expense, Purchase Order, and Contract data within one centralized location.


Zylo + Coupa: A Holistic View of SaaS Spend across Invoice, Expense & PO

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SaaS is the future of software, the foundation of the hybrid workplace and the cornerstone of employee effectiveness.If you are an IT, Software Asset Management, or Procurement professional or executive looking to harness the power of your SaaS,&nbsp;optimize your investments, save money, and grow your business, check out these sessions from SaaSMe - the Enterprise SaaS Management Event powered by Zylo.

SaaSMe - The SaaS Management Event

Thom: Really excited to chat today. We're going to dive in and discuss Zylo and Coupa, a holistic view of SaaS spend across invoice, expense, and purchase orders. So by way of introduction, I'm Thom McCorkle, I'm the Senior Director of Growth, Acceleration and Operations here at Zylo. I've actually been at Zylo for coming up on six years, so when you've been around as long as I have in the SaaS management space, kind of makes me a dinosaur and gets you those creative titles like Senior Director of Growth, Acceleration and Operations. I'm joined by Si, who I'll allow them to introduce themselves, really some of the brain power and mastermind behind how we've integrated Coupa. So Si, you want to say hello?Si Harris-Adam: Thanks, Tom. My name is Si Harris-Adam. I'm a Product Owner here at Zylo. I'm coming up on my one year anniversary here next week, so maybe a few more years, I can tack a few more words onto my title. But for now, it's Product Owner. I work with our integrations team and I've been really pushing our partnership with Coupa and the integrations we're building up with them, so I'm excited to be here.Thom: Awesome. Yeah, there you go. It's after every year, you can tack a word onto your title. That's great. Well, awesome. Here's our agenda for today. In our time together, don't forget, ask questions, share experiences in the chat. If we're talking about things that are really resonating with you, we would love to hear that. If there are things that don't make sense and you want us to elaborate, we'll make sure that we leave a little bit of time at the end here so we can have a discussion. So yesterday, we heard a lot about SaaS management being a team sport. It was the title of some sessions, we heard from Software Asset Management, procurement, IT, leadership, and really as we've tackled SaaS management with our customers, both from a product standpoint as well as working with them hand in hand, there's this concept where teams are bringing their own tools into the data set that we're looking at. So we obviously have our AP and our expense and we have our utilization, but there's this whole process happening with purchase orders that we really wanted to ensure that we were incorporating. So specifically, today we're going to talk about bringing that team and that tool set of Coupa PO into Zylo and your SaaS management program. So as it relates to SaaS management, there's a few challenges that we heard, and Si's going to get a little bit more specific here, but broad business level challenges. First off, it's hard to find and track your SaaS data. There's various spreadsheets, various systems, there was already a little bit of normalization that we were helping folks with by bringing in payment data and contract data, but still slightly fragmented. This is a really important concept because not only is data all over your business, you probably don't have access to that data natively. If you're in procurement, you don't have an Okta admin account to go and check on logs, or an administrator account to be able to build reports inside of Salesforce. And when you have all of those silos, you essentially don't have all the data to make strategic decisions. With these data silos, procurement has their finger on the pulse of the renewals that you're managing, that you're tracking, that you're owning, but you don't have other key pieces of data around usage. IT doesn't always have all of that information. So with all of these silos, the data really makes it hard to drive business decisions. And then finally, inherently, you set up these processes and these procedures for purchasing of Saas, and there's really no check to truly understand if there are things happening outside of that process, unless serendipitously, you happen to stumble upon it or it gets discovered. So being able to really monitor if there's anything going outside of a PO process is really a key insight that we wanted to surface. So going to lean on my friend David Rose from Schitt's Creek. In other words, it's very dark, it's hard to see what's going on. You kind of don't know what you don't know other than the fact that data's all over the place. So now I'm going to hand it over to Si and have him tell a little bit about what we heard as we worked with our customers.Si Harris-Adam: Absolutely. I mean, to segue right off of that, we didn't know what we didn't know about the problems you were facing, so we took it to you. We conducted a lot of research, we asked a lot of questions, trying to get a sense from you, our client base, what it was that you needed to be able to manage SaaS spend effectively. And so first of all, what we heard was that you said you were tired of bouncing back and forth between applications to try to compare relevant data, juggling too many open tabs, logging into this, that and the other. It was too much to handle. You said you wanted a single comprehensive source of truth for data on your SaaS applications. One place to have it all live and just have it there in front of you. And you needed all that data earlier in your purchasing process and not after the money's already out the door. So to sum up, you need your SaaS purchase order data in Zylo. Now, we gathered up all this information, so what are we going to do about it? Well, what we did was we built purchase order management into Zylo through our Coupa partners, so that we're pulling purchase orders from Coupa, putting it in your Zylo app. Everything's right in front of you.Thom: Awesome. So I'm going to talk a little bit about purchase order management for Coupa, and then Si's going to give us a demo here in a little bit. But first off, the concept that is really key, and I mentioned I've been with Zylo for so long, I kind of got used to the way things are. But one of the really key elements that this is going to.. That this is allowing our customers to do, is get more of a forward look at SaaS purchases. Going to the actuals is a great way to discover things that you weren't previously tracking, understand what you're actually spending and compare that information to a contract. But the reality is, a lot of you are pros at negotiating and driving contracts and managing vendors, and you're working in 30, 45, 60, 90 day terms into those renewals and those new purchases. So as a result, there's a systematic delay that was happening for your visibility. So being able to flip from a backwards looking view into a forwards looking view, where as soon as those POs are being cut, Zylo knows that those are coming down the pipe. We know that this is something that was renewed or was purchased net new much, much earlier. And then we'll see what Si shows us is we have the ability to then take and tie out that actual purchase at a later time. So as we think about your purchase orders now coming in at the speed of Saas, there's a few key things that I want to talk about. We're bringing that view of managing POs invoices, expense and contracts all in one place, and putting that right next to your utilization data, allowing you to get a full view, a fuller view of your SaaS applications and understand where the opportunities may lie. I hit on this earlier, but earlier and more proactive visibility to see applications as they're coming into your stack, to see renewals before the payments are actually hitting, is a really key point here. And then finally, tracking that granular purchase order detail. So whether it's a purchase order direct with a vendor, whether it's a purchase order that's through a reseller where you're buying multiple applications, being able to go in and drill into the exact details that are coming through and get a picture of how things are being bought in your organization without having to jump from Zylo to Coupa, from Zylo to Coupa, and for those who, obviously everyone here has Zylo, but those who aren't leveraging SaaS management tool have even more of a pain because they're going from Zylo to an email to finance to check in on the payments, to accounting to make sure that no employees are dispensing a tool, to IT to see if they can get some usage on that data. So essentially, so what, right? That's a question we love to ask here at Zylo a lot. So what does this ultimately allow you to do? It lets you get ahead of your SaaS spend, manage it in a proactive manner versus a reactive. It allows you to identify purchases that are happening outside of your processes and bring those in. Make sure that you are, one, leveraging all of your spend and have that full visibility as you're planning and making a forward look with your purchase orders, but two, also making sure that there's not purchasing that's happening outside and off policy. And then finally, driving a more accurate budgetary and planning cycle. Your purchase order is really a forecast of what you were planning to do, what you were planning to spend. So by being able to see not only point in time, what was that planned spend versus actual, but as the contract is progressing and those payments are being made, and potential overages are coming in and you're getting hit with overages and understanding, did we forecast and plan for the right amount? So shifting gears, we'd love to talk about how some of our customers are using purchase order management today before we dive over into a demo. So initially, I've talked on this a little bit, but really bringing in and analyzing utilization data to pull back spending. Depending on the organization, there's an operation... There may or may not be an operational rhythm around removing licenses that aren't being used. And sometimes it's hard to understand where the priority is. By bringing Coupa data into Zylo, we can see instances like," I have nine months left on this PO and I've hit 50% of the spend because we missed our forecast on how many licenses we were going to need." Well, to not have to go back to the well and ask for more, what if we control that growth? We see that we're outpacing what we had planned, let's claw back some licenses to be able to get that growth back in pace for what we had planned for. On the opposite scenario, if you're out there and you are really managing your licenses tightly and you had forecasted 20% growth throughout the year on a tool, but you were actually able to reallocate unused licenses for all of your new users, there's some extra dollars and cents there. That can be a great opportunity for the business to reallocate some of those dollars and fund other projects. Go back to the vendor and see if there's any add- ons or extra functionality that you wanted and didn't have in the plan that you could add on as well. And then finally, taking a look at that forecast on a quarterly basis. So understanding how we're pacing, understanding what opportunities we have to make sure that we're on target for our finance and business partners. Now, I'd love to hand it over to Si to do a quick demo and show a few of those key use cases.Si Harris-Adam: All right, thank you. And pull this up here.Thom: And there was a poll that was launched. As Si gets set up, would love to understand how your organization's using purchase orders.Si Harris-Adam: Yeah. So this... Everyone should be seeing the Zylo dashboard. This is familiar territory for everyone. This is the main landing page. One of the things we've added is this chart right here, and this is your holistic view of your SaaS spend. So you'll notice right away, you've got your how much you have on improved spend, how much you've already earmarked for PO expenditures. You can also filter in on how much you've spent against those POs, how much you have opened on those POs, as well as what you've spent that is not attached to any PO. So if you have a policy at your company where all SaaS spend needs to go through POs, you can glance at this and see we are in or out of compliance. You can also get a closer track of," Okay, we're halfway through our PO spend," as Tom mentioned, and these link directly into the data in Zylo that informs these charts. So let's dive deeper into purchase orders. Under our payments top nav here, you'll see we've added purchase orders as an option, and here we've got header data showing aggregate data on all of your POs, how much you have to spend, how much you have spent, percentages, and some graphical formats for people who prefer that. And here we've got all the data you need to keep track of your purchase orders, who they're for, how much you've spent. Now sometimes you'll notice if you're buying Box, you're buying it from Box, sometimes you're buying from a resupplier, a CW and SHI and so forth. You can nail down to the PO line level where your application spend is going, where it's been assigned, and how much you've spent. So for example, here, this purchase order looks like it's only about halfway done, but using data we're populating from Coupa, you can see at the line level, the PO as a whole is only halfway done, but someone's already overspending on Zendesk. So easy ways to track how you're doing on your purchase order spend. This is data that populates the same cadence as all the rest of our data, so we're pulling this in every night. So within 24 hours, you have the most recent data available. Now this is at the purchase order level. This is the sort of the higher level, but we can go in particular to each application and get a closer look there as well. So let's say Creative Cloud. Creative Cloud, something that many of us use. So on your payment activity page, where many of us spend time tracking our expenses, we've added a new shark here where you can weigh how much you have in approved purchase orders against what you've spent in both assigned PO and non- assigned PO spend. This is great for keeping track of maintaining policy that if you're spending against a PO, you should be making sure that's assigned in your ERP, in your AP system, so that you can make sure that no one's spending when they're not supposed to. An easy way to do that is you can filter your charges as you'd normally see them against whether or not they've been assigned to a PO. So let's say for the sake of argument, we're going to filter on a PO number is blank, and all of a sudden our chart's only showing us non- approved spend, and we can see here," Oh, here's an invoice charge that has not been assigned to a PO. Someone's been naughty, they need to have it talking to." And at the app level, you can go in and assign all of these and make sure that everything's been accounted for properly. All of these charges, just as we match them and check them for SaaS relevance, we do the same thing with your purchase orders. So as the purchase orders come in, we analyze the data, we check and see," Okay, this is going to Box, this one's going to Salesforce, This one is from a CDW, but is addressing Zendesk and Microsoft and Google, so we're making sure to count that. As well as we account for the fact that you might have a purchase order with some lines that are SaaS relevant and some that aren't. Let's say you've got two lines that are for Adobe Creative Cloud, Adobe Analytics, and then a third PO line that's for your customer support. You might not want to count that as your SaaS spend because they're not buying SaaS with it. We can accommodate that as well, and discount the spend on that line against your SaaS expenditures. So you're getting the most accurate tracking of your SaaS data as possible. That's the quick sum up of what we've been pulling together.Thom: Hey Si, I know when we were in the kind of research phase, some of the feedback that we got was, finance and accounting, they're usually good at putting PO numbers on payments when they're happening, but the data's kind of a mess sometimes and that tieback can sometimes be difficult. Can you talk a little bit about the matching logic that we put in place to kind of help that process along and make sure that we're automatically matching those POs to those invoices?Si Harris-Adam: Sure. All the invoices and charges that come in, at the time of import, we check them to make sure do they have a purchase order? Do we have a purchase order that matches in our system? If not, we check and see is there an inferential logic we can apply to make sure that this lines up. So it's not just an exact match, it's taking into account the variations between systems. If you're pulling it in directly from Coupa, it might look one way. If you're pulling your invoices in from NetSuite or Concur, it might be somewhat different. So we apply inaudible magic to make sure that we're getting as accurate as possible details in there. We can't guarantee we catch everything, but we're catching a lot, and there's always a manual adjustment. If something got filed without a PO number on it, you can always go into Zylo and make sure that's attached.Thom: Awesome. Yeah. I think that's pretty cool how we took some of those discovery core competencies and really brought them into kind of this matching and this tie out process, so hopefully removing that manual lift for folks on bringing those POs and those payments together. Great. Awesome. Well, I will take over the presentation here and let's jump into some key takeaways. I think really, as we review and we think about why we built the Coupa and Zylo integration, some key takeaways that I want you all to take is first off, that ability to monitor systematically the controls and the policies that you have in place. So identify where there's rogue spend, whether that's an employee with a transaction on a credit card, or that's a department that went out and signed up for an agreement that's getting invoiced. Really regained control of that process, but also use it to inform other options for your policy, right? So being able to see," Okay, if our policy is any single purchase over$50, 000 has to be on a PO, what if there's three people with$ 25,000 purchases", right? And there are kind of all over the place. So that visibility to say," This should really actually trigger a purchase order for us to come in because while the individual points of purchase on an application are under our threshold, in total, they actually are above it. So we need to drive some centralization and some policy there." Tracking your actual and future spend and stick with your budget, this is really key with consumption based applications, right? It's very hard to guess at what your spend is going to be with Datadog and AWS or some of these tools that have a consumption element to it. Being able to see at a glance essentially how am I pacing towards that PO and how much time is left on it. And also, be more effective at your role and improve business outcomes. A big piece to that is being able to speak the same language with different teams. Procurement's thinking in POs, accounting's thinking in invoice payments and accounts payable, IT's thinking and contract amounts, so producing contract amounts as well. So being able to help centralize and drive all of this information into one spot is super, super powerful.