Discovering Shadow Spend

Buying SaaS applications is dangerously easy. Anyone with a credit card and an email address can subscribe to an application and start using it that same day, regardless of your internal policies.

This results in the rapid proliferation—typically outside official procurement channels—of SaaS applications throughout an organization.

Managing Unsanctioned SaaS Applications

Important:The Flexera One Administer SaaS role is required to manage unsanctioned SaaS applications. For complete descriptions of each role available in Flexera One, see Flexera One Roles.

The Unsanctioned SaaS Applications page gives you visibility of your SaaS applications–regardless of whether they’re licensed, approved, or authorized–so you can reduce costs and eliminate risks. The Unsanctioned SaaS Spend table only displays when your company has connected an expense or financial software to SaaS Management. For a list of expense SaaS applications that are supported by SaaS Management, see the Expense column in Instructions.

In the Unsanctioned Purchases page you can review each unsanctioned purchase and decide whether to add the application to your organization’s list of Managed SaaS Applications or to exclude the expense.

To start managing a SaaS application or to exclude expenses:

1.

From the SaaS menu, click Unsanctioned SaaS Applications. The Unsanctioned SaaS Applications page opens.

2.

If you want, you can sort the data by Vendor or any of the other Unsanctioned SaaS Applications grid column headings.

3.

If you want to filter unsanctioned spend, enter a search term in the Search field. The search term will be searched across Vendor, Application, Application Status, Purchaser, Department, and Location.

4.

If you have the Administer SaaS role, you can:

a.

Start managing SaaS applications by clicking the plus (+) sign Start Managing This App in the Actions column. You are then taken to the Add an Application workflow available in the Managed SaaS Applications page. Follow the steps for Adding an Application.

b.

Exclude SaaS application expenses by clicking the minus (-) sign Exclude Expense in the Actions column. When you exclude an application expense, it is removed from view on the Unsanctioned SaaS Applications page. Also, the All-Time Spend and All-Time Purchases tiles are updated accordingly. If you decide later to include the expense, slide the Show Excluded button to the right, find the appropriate expense, and click the minus (-) sign Include Expense.

5.

Click Export CSV to further analyze the data.

Note:The exported CSV file only contains the filtered data.