What process do you follow to download invoices of all the SaaS products you use?
At the moment we have over 40 SaaS applications we use to run our business (accounts, marketing, tools, development and so on).
This is one of the tasks I absolutely hate doing every month when I receive the email from our account department can you please get us the invoices for Amazon, Intercom, Stripe, Typeform etc.
I tried to tackle the situation in many ways.
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Creating a dedicated expense email address, providing access to the accounts team, and wherever possible if the platform allows specifying a separate email address for billing, I specify it.
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Use LastPass shared password features, provide access to certain sites which are not critical for the business (ex: I can give access to non-technical people for Amazon but not for DNS provider or MongoDb Cloud)
Still every month I'll receive at least 10-12 missing ones (maybe new SaaS services we added/experimenting that month)
The big pain point I see is, every SaaS product does billing/invoicing in different ways, most of the time it's not just going to settings>billing>download invoices, it will be 5 minutes discovery where are the invoices (check LinkedIn, when you have paid personnel, sales navigator, ads etc)
At one point I even thought someone can build a product, you just add all the SaaS products you use to a platform, that will simply collect and keep all the invoices in one place (or expense management systems like Expensify can have these features)
How do you solve this problem? Maybe it just requires some process improvement from our side. I would like to understand what other founders are doing.
I managed the bills at a startup I worked for before - I put the totals in a spreadsheet. I also have this problem with personal spending - having to keep folders and folders of downloaded invoices and manually enter them into Quicken.
I did wonder if it's possible to have some kind of aggregator so all the bills and their details can be read in one place. Ideally, companies retire PDFs and use some form of standard for bills.
Let me know if you find any tools for this.
For my personal monthly subscriptions (Netflix, Hulu, etc.) I use the site/app Personal Capital to keep track of all transactions. But what you want exactly for business might not work. I also have used Zapier and Gmail: anytime a subject with "receipt" is sent to a certain email, it records it in a Google spreadsheet.
You may want to give some of these apps a try https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cnet.com/google-amp/news/never-forget-about-another-paid-subscription-with-these-trackers/
Hope that helps!
I do the same, download them manually :|.
I never download invoices.
Do you use any sort of accounting software?
What accounting software you using :) ?