CFOs, IT and Line of Business Employees Can Now Easily Manage Procurement Workflows Across Entire Business Spend Lifecycle—From Initial Request, to Purchase, to Renewal
Zip, the world’s leading intake-to-procure solution, announced the launch of Zip Renewals, a new feature that uniquely provides finance leaders with both insight on upcoming renewal spend as well as automation of the renewal process. This combination empowers finance teams to find cost efficiencies as contracts renew and at the same time eliminate tedious work by employees and finance in processing renewals. Zip is uniquely able to help teams manage the rapid growth of SaaS and services spend by combining visibility into software and service renewal dates, automated alerts when a contract is set to renew and an automatically triggered workflow to orchestrate the renewal process. Businesses can now proactively and efficiently manage the renewal processes that are fundamental to their operations. Additionally, Zip has achieved SOC 1 Type 2 certification to validate having the controls in place necessary for customers to be able to meet their SOX compliance obligations.
“In today’s changing economic climate, contract renewals are an important piece in the puzzle of how finance leaders can balance empowering employees to make distributed spend decisions, while taking every opportunity to find cost savings,” said Rujul Zaparde, co-founder and CEO of Zip. “On the one hand, our customers told us that renewals can be just as time consuming and complex as the initial procurement process. Zip Renewals removes roadblocks during renewals by automatically triggering a renewal request at the right time, alerting the right people, pre-populating the renewal request with existing information and automatically routing the request for only the approvals needed at renewal. At the same time, finance teams get visibility into upcoming renewal spend and control over the renewal process, allowing them to eliminate redundant vendors and renegotiate contracts. It makes everyone’s lives easier—from employees using subscription-based tools to do their jobs, to CFOs managing spend.”
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By involving stakeholders at just the right time, Zip Renewals empowers businesses to maintain continuous access to their purchases, ensures they receive the best deal possible on a contract renewal and proactively consolidates vendors to reduce excessive spend. Negotiations can take place with enough time to evaluate security and compliance considerations and avoid termination fees.
For finance and other employees who must manage the renewal process, Zip streamlines the process and even eliminates unnecessary approvals. The majority of companies today manage all information related to renewals in spreadsheets—often with thousands of rows and dozens of columns—to keep a record of current software and services details. This data often remains siloed from the procurement process and vendor record systems. By handling the spend request workflow, Zip Intake-to-Procure maintains a record of all software and service purchases. Zip Renewals leverages this unique data set to automate around the pain points associated with gathering purchase information and tracking renewals, including information in contract management systems and ERP vendor records. Zip brings all the necessary data together in one place and automates the approval processes.
“At the rapid pace of business today, it’s more common than ever for contract renewals to slip through the cracks. This can lead to massive financial impact at scale and a lot of frustration,” said Ivan Makarov, VP of finance at Webflow. “With Zip Renewals, we have been able to do away with manual processes and streamline purchase renewals. Everything is in one, easy-to-navigate place, so we no longer have to sift through old documents or email to find our most recent master service agreements and contracts. Our team loves the uninterrupted access to the subscriptions they use. And, we can also now optimize our spend across our various software and services contracts with very little effort.”
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Additional features and benefits of Zip Renewals include:
- Dashboard: The Zip Renewals dashboard highlights contract end dates and auto-renewal status, with robust filtering capabilities and a back-end view into expected renewal work for procurement for the next two years.
- Timeline View: Zip displays several months of upcoming renewals at a glance, so procurement professionals can see what renewals are in progress and upcoming. Monthly reminders are also available for agreements that don’t have renewals.
- Designated Renewal Stakeholder: Users can easily designate all of the key stakeholders involved in the renewal process so that everyone is aware of what stage of the renewal process is in.
- Backup Renewal Queue: Designate a set of people who will be notified of a renewal if the primary stakeholder leaves the organization before the renewal is due.
- One-click Information Gathering: With a single click, users can easily find all of the information from an original purchase request and pre-populate the renewal intake form. Requestors can optionally change any of the existing data before submitting the renewal request. In addition, procurement teams can request and collect any additional information needed with customizable intake fields.
- Customizable Configuration: Users can leverage pre-configured workflows or tailor approval steps for each unique renewal workflow.
Zip Achieves SOC 1 Type 2 Compliance
Enterprises and financial services firms subject to strict regulations, such as Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX), put their trust in Zip to handle important financial data and workflows that their businesses depend on. As part of the company’s commitment to keeping customers in compliance with financial regulations, Zip has achieved SOC 1 Type 2 certification, which addresses both the design and testing of controls over a period of time. A SOC 1 report validates internal controls of organizations that handle customer data with the potential to impact customer financial reporting.