When each team at a growing company buys its own software, the same problems appear in different forms. The marketing team picks a project management tool without knowing the operations team already uses one. Finance subscribes to a reporting tool that overlaps with the BI platform IT purchased last quarter. A contractor signs the company up for an annual plan with a credit card that no one will remember exists until the invoice arrives in twelve months.
None of these decisions are obviously wrong in isolation. Together, they add up to a pattern: overlapping tools, unused licences, auto-renewals that nobody approved, and a software spend that grows faster than headcount because no one has a complete view of it.
A SaaS procurement process is the set of steps your company follows before approving any new software purchase. It doesn't require a procurement department. It requires a consistent approach and someone accountable for applying it.
What ad hoc buying actually costs
The financial cost of unstructured SaaS buying is partly the direct waste and partly the internal overhead of making poor decisions and managing around them.
Research from SMB Group's 2024 SMB Buying Journey Survey found that 16% of SMBs determine their technology budgets on a purely ad hoc basis, with no structured evaluation process. The consequence shows up downstream: in a separate survey of over 700 businesses, Capterra found that 58% of companies reported regretting a recent software purchase.
58% of companies reported regretting a recent software purchase.
Capterra (Gartner Digital Markets), 2024 U.S. Tech Trends Report
Regret after a software purchase is not a random event. It follows a pattern: the evaluation was narrow (one person, short timeline, no input from adjacent teams), the comparison was limited (the tool that came up in a search, not the market), and the ongoing cost structure wasn't fully understood at the time of signing.
16% of SMBs determine their technology budgets on a purely ad hoc basis, with no structured evaluation process.
A procurement process doesn't eliminate these problems, but it creates the friction points that catch them.
The five questions every SaaS purchase should answer
The purpose of a procurement process is not to slow down buying. It's to ensure that the same five questions get asked before every purchase, regardless of who's requesting the tool or what the annual cost is.
Does this tool already exist in the business? Before evaluating a new tool, check the current software register. Duplicate functionality is one of the most common forms of SaaS waste. The person requesting the tool may not know what others in the business already use. A central register makes that check a ten-second step rather than a week of asking around.
What is the total annual cost? Monthly pricing shown on a vendor website understates the real cost. Multiply by twelve, add the per-seat fee at the expected number of users, check whether the features you need are on the plan being quoted or require an upgrade, and look for any annual minimum commitment. The real number is often materially different from the headline.
Who else in the business needs to know about this? A tool that stores customer data has compliance implications. A tool used for external communications needs brand review. A tool that integrates with existing systems needs IT sign-off. Identifying stakeholders before buying rather than after avoids the discovery that the tool can't be used as intended.
What are the contract terms? Auto-renewal clauses, notice periods, price increase rights, and minimum commitment terms are standard in SaaS contracts. Understanding them at the point of purchase, rather than at the renewal twelve months later, is the difference between making an informed decision and getting locked in.
How will we know if this is working? A tool without a success metric has no cancellation trigger. The question "what would make us cancel this subscription?" is worth asking before buying, not twelve months later when the tool has accumulated inertia and a renewal deadline is approaching.
What to capture in a software register
A software register is the central record of every tool the business pays for. It doesn't need to be elaborate, but it needs to exist and it needs to be accurate.
The minimum fields worth capturing:
The register serves two functions. First, it gives anyone evaluating a new tool a complete view of what already exists, so duplicate purchases are caught before they happen. Second, it gives finance and operations a single source of truth for software spend, so the question "what are we paying for?" has an answer that doesn't require combing through bank statements.
Making the process work without adding bureaucracy
The failure mode for procurement processes in growing companies is over-engineering. A process that requires a five-person approval committee and a two-week lead time for a $50/month tool will be routed around within a month.
The right approach scales with the cost and the stakes. A $30/month productivity tool used by one person might require only a check against the software register and a manager approval. A $30,000/year platform used across the business warrants a structured evaluation, stakeholder review, contract legal check, and a formal decision record.
The practical minimum: every new software purchase goes through the five questions above before approval, the tool is added to the software register on the day of purchase, and an owner is named. Those three steps, applied consistently, close the largest gaps that ad hoc buying creates.
The company that has a software register and asks five questions before every purchase is materially better positioned than the company that doesn't, not because the process is sophisticated but because it creates visibility that was otherwise absent.
Ensurva surfaces your existing vendor spend automatically from your accounting data, giving you the software register you should have without the manual work of building one from scratch. Connect your accounting system and see where your software budget is going in under an hour.
