Zylo Tips: Using App Budgets to Monitor Budget Pacing throughout the Year

Imagine you’re in the midst of budgeting season. You’ve used data in Zylo to validate your SaaS budget and identified that the amount you plan to spend is within the realm of reality. Once your budget is set, Zylo’s App Budgets becomes your sidekick to monitor how that budget is pacing throughout the year.

What Is App Budgets?

App Budgets enables you to track actual spending alongside your budgeted amount for each application in your inventory. Zylo also identifies budget overruns and apps at risk for overrun so you can remediate that with license management or other cost-reduction measures.

Spend discovery really comes to life in App Budgets. Zylo discovers every single transaction for every application, and categorizes and classifies those apps and transactions. 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. 

How to Use App Budgets

So how do you track your budget in Zylo? To start, navigate to Budgets, which is found in the Inventory tab. When you first jump in, you’re looking at the budgets for all of the applications inside your stack. 

In the example below, the list of applications is filtered to IT-owned applications. At a glance, you can quickly see how each application is performing. By showing the budget for the current and previous year (second and third columns), you can see how it has changed year over year. Then, in the fourth column, you can see your fiscal-year-to-date spending as it’s pacing to that year.

Analyzing this data, you can see a couple of line items at the top where PagerDuty, Wrike, and a few other tools are running over what was budgeted. This is not a great place to be. 

Some of the first people you should talk to are the application owner or the business owner. For instance, you may want to talk to the primary cost center that’s driving that spending so you can investigate what’s going on with this tool.

Make Informed Decisions with Pre-Built Budgeting Insights

Zylo has pre-built insights to help you dig into the different apps that you should be paying attention to. These insights are helpful to see where your spend is exceeding the most so you can address those tools and put plans in place. Here are a few examples:

1. Fiscal Year-to-Date Spending: Identify where you’re exceeding your budget
2. Largest Year-over-Year Budget Increases: Identify applications with trending budget increases
3. Largest Year-over-Year Budget Decreases: Identify applications with trending budget decreases

Tactics to Avoid Budget Overruns

To avoid budget overruns, there are a few tactics you can employ.

The first is to optimize your renewal life cycle, which we talked about in another tips video. Upcoming renewals is a great place to address your needs and reduce costs to help relieve budget constraints.

Second, make sure you’re managing the licenses for those applications. If you can re-harvest those licenses, that may help you avoid a true up or the need to buy more seats.

Keep Your Budget on Track with Zylo’s App Budgets

If your software 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 where you can free up dollars. To learn more, check out the Knowledge Base or reach out to your CSM.