For any company, especially those with thousands of employees, keeping track of vendors and contract renewals can quickly become overwhelming without the right system in place. Vendor management is not optional. It is essential for reducing spend, staying compliant, and ensuring business continuity.
As a director of business enablement at a large global SaaS company explained to us, visibility into vendor relationships is key. For their organisation, it is critical to know who they are buying from, what agreements they have in place, the compliance rules they must follow, how services are being used, and when renewals are due.
Moving vendor management away from Excel
This team came to Starhive to explore whether our platform could act as their vendor management solution. Their goal was to manage contracts, financial data, and usage information in one place. Up until then, they had been using Excel, something that worked well enough when the company was smaller. However, rapid growth meant they now needed to manage thousands of vendors and agreements, and spreadsheets were no longer fit for purpose.
The team identified several must-have requirements:
Granular permissions
Excel permissions are broad: a user can either view everything or edit everything. This creates risk and makes mistakes common. In reality, different people are responsible for different vendors or even different aspects of a single vendor. For example, one person might manage contract renewals, while another monitors usage. Also keeping track of the spend with each vendor is critical for the business but not something everyone should be able to see. They needed permissions as precise as controlling view and edit access to a single cell in a spreadsheet, ensuring each person only saw or edited what was relevant to them.
Contracts at their fingertips
The existing process stored contracts on a shared drive with links pasted into Excel. This was clunky and unreliable. Updating links when new contracts went live was easily forgotten, and there was no version history. Finding older contracts meant hunting through folders, slowing down decision-making and creating compliance risks.
Notifications and tasks
Missing a renewal date or breaching a contract can cost a business thousands; either through higher costs or regulatory fines. The team needed automated alerts to ensure the right people were notified of upcoming deadlines or usage thresholds. Excel simply couldn’t provide this functionality.
A vendor management solution with Starhive
With Starhive, the company gains a centralised vendor management solution that went far beyond what Excel could provide.
All vendors are added to a single database, complete with key information such as contact details. Every contract can be uploaded and linked directly to the vendor record, with critical data points like seat counts, expiration dates, and agreed service levels extracted for easy viewing. This means an administrator could instantly view all past and active contracts for a vendor in one place.
Starhive’s granular permissions allows the business to restrict access by role and team. For example, permissions can be set so a team member can edit the hours used of a service contract without seeing the price of the contract. This reduces the risk of errors while still giving individuals the information and edit permissions they needed to do their jobs.
Finally, automation transformed how the business managed vendors. Starhive sends alerts ahead of renewals or when usage thresholds are close to being reached. The company has and existing ticketing system and Starhive can auto-generate tasks, complete with linked vendor and contract information to cut down the admin burden on employees and focus on the tasks that will ensure efficient use of the business’ budget.
The value of a vendor management solution
This shift has helps the SaaS provider regain control of both spend and compliance. With a single protected source of vendor data, the business can:
- Ensure renewals happen on time
- Make faster, more informed decisions
- Provide secure access to the right information for the right people
- Maintain compliance across thousands of vendor relationships
By replacing spreadsheets with a dedicated vendor management solution using Starhive, this company has a foundation for sustainable growth while reducing operational risk.
If you're struggling with vendor management in your organisation, get in touch. Book a demo with us and together we can explore if Starhive will work for your business.
