Zylo Tips: How to Track Renewal Cost Savings with Savings Center

In our tips series on operationalizing renewals, we covered what you need to do at 120, 90, and 60 days ahead of renewal. During these milestones, you collaborated with application owners, ran a workflow to reclaim unused licenses, and benchmarked pricing.

Next, the final step is to track any cost savings you achieved. Let’s look at how you can take credit for your hard work and use Zylo Savings Center to track wins and report on your program success. 

What Is Savings Center?

Zylo Savings Center serves as a centralized hub for you to track savings events across all your applications.

Every time a savings action is taken – such as reclaiming unused licenses, benchmarking a better price, canceling an application and more – Savings Center automatically captures these activities. 

Tracking your individual savings events and cumulative savings over time is key to showing the value and ROI of your SaaS Management program.

Defining Common Terms in Savings Center

Before you begin tracking savings in Zylo, there are a few terms to understand.

Identified vs Realized

Identified are savings events where an application has been flagged as the potential to save. That could be inactive users, a benchmark price that’s lower than what you’re paying, or it could be the potential to cancel an application. The net of it is it hasn’t been acted on yet. 

Realized are savings events that have been acted on. For example, you negotiated a better price, removed licenses, or canceled an application.

Savings vs Avoidance

Savings equates to hard cost savings. An example would be if you actually lowered your price at renewal, or you actually canceled an application. 

Avoidance is when you prevent the business from spending more money. For example, you’re out of a specific license type for an application and need 50 more for onboarding new employees. Instead of buying 50 more, you could look at your inactive users, deprovision those licenses, and give them to the people that need them. 

While some customers differentiate between savings and avoidance, you can also track it all as savings.

The Anatomy of a Savings Event

Zylo automatically creates savings events based on actions you take in the application, but you can also create your own custom events. With both, you can always go back and edit the values or take notes.

Let’s look at the anatomy of a savings event. 

• Event name – an internal identifier that describes the event
• Value type – determine if it is identified or realized savings or avoidance
• Event type – price benchmarks, inactive users, downgraded users, deprovisioned users, or sentiment survey (or custom!)
• Value – quantify the savings event
• Quantity of licenses – critical for license-based savings events
• Related app – map the savings event to a specific application

How to Track Savings Events

Start by navigating to Applications via the Inventory Tab. Then, click into the application overview for a specific app. In this case, we’ll use Salesforce as our example. Looking at the Savings tab, you can see the historical savings for any event that was tracked for this tool. 

When you negotiated your Salesforce renewal, you were able to add a free sandbox instance – a need the business had raised. While Zylo automatically captures events like license deprovisioning and benchmarks, it does not capture this type of event. This is a great scenario to create your own custom savings event.

Follow these steps:

• Name your event something recognizable. In this example, we’ve named it: Salesforce – Feature Add-On
• Assign a value type. Because the cost of the sandbox was money you’d have otherwise spent if you weren’t able to negotiate it for free, this is identified avoidance. 
• Determine the event type. There isn’t an existing type in the dropdown that makes sense, so we can add a new type, which we’ll call Free Functionality.
• Add the value amount, which was $10,000.
• Add the date occurred.
• Track the quantity of licenses associated with this event.
• Select Salesforce as the related app so you can track savings over time for the application.

Reporting on Your Savings Wins

It’s important to report these savings wins to your executive team. Savings is one of those key metrics that should be relayed to the team on a regular cadence to track your progress and your overall program goals. 

To make it easy to see progress, you can look to the savings widget on the Analytics dashboard. Here we represent savings over time that can be grouped by calendar or fiscal year, or monthly or quarterly.

This tip concludes our series on operationalizing your SaaS renewals. To take a deeper dive into Savings Center, be sure to check out the Knowledge Base, where we have a webinar that goes in depth into this feature and functionality.