Tracking Subscriptions Tips for Nonprofits with Pat Sprehe

How do you track your subscriptions and licenses? Why is it important to know who has which subscription at your nonprofit? 

Many clients come to Community IT experiencing difficulty tracking IT inventory. In addition to tracking physical hardware, laptops, and devices, nonprofits also can find it difficult to track licenses and software subscriptions to cloud-based apps and IT tools. 

The rise in cloud-based software-as-a-service (SaaS) models has led to ease of use. It is really easy to sign up for a subscription to many IT tools and platforms that can help productivity and benefit your nonprofit. But there are many advantages to tracking subscriptions, and disadvantages – financial and security – over leaving subscriptions and licenses up to individuals on your staff. Also make sure your nonprofit has strong practices for off-boarding staff and ending their subscriptions and licenses when no longer needed. 

Director of Information Systems and Technology Pat Sprehe joins Carolyn in this podcast to discuss the reasons your nonprofit should care about licenses and subscriptions, and how to go about managing the ecosystem from an IT and budget perspective. Among other duties, Pat manages subscriptions and licenses for Community IT staff and is well aware of the challenges and issues.

Learn best practices to manage costs and ensure security for all your users, without stifling their entrepreneurship and self-management. With a little prioritization now, you can ensure your organization is protected from bad actors and can save on subscriptions and licenses.

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Transcript

Carolyn Woodard: Welcome everyone to the Community IT Innovators Podcast. I’m Carolyn Woodard, and I am here today with my friend Pat Sprehe, who is going to tell us a little bit more about managing your subscriptions at a nonprofit. So Pat, would you like to introduce yourself?

Pat Sprehe: Sure. My name is Patrick Sprehe. I’m the Director of Information Systems and Technology at Community IT.

I handle a lot of the internal IT here, so I am responsible, among other things, managing our subscriptions and licensing.

Licenses for Software in the Cloud

Carolyn Woodard: This is one of those aspects of IT support that’s really grown over the last 10 years or so, because it used to be that if you had software, you had a physical floppy disk that you put in and ran. But now we have almost everything available as a subscription service in the Cloud. So, it seems like that would make things a lot more complicated.

Pat Sprehe: Yes and no. In a lot of ways, it’s actually made things easier. It used to be, as you said, you had a piece of software and then you had a license key, and you would install the software wherever you needed it, and then you would use the license key to license that software.

Except that there was no real way to track who had the software, or once you lost track, what devices that software were on. If, for example, a user got the license key, they could just go home and install the software on their home computer, and you would have no idea. The vendors also didn’t have good track of how many licenses you were using at your organization, in part because you would have to uninstall or reinstall and reapply that license key.

And so there was no way for them to keep track either.

Carolyn Woodard: When all of these subscriptions moved into the cloud, how did that change your ability to track who has what subscription and what you’re paying for at your non-profit?

Pat Sprehe: In about the early 2000s, vendors started to switch to a SaaS model, so a software-as-a-service model. Now you’re subscribing to a service, and that service is the software application that comes with it. And the big change really is that the software is being licensed to users instead of just a certain number of installs with a license key.

There are a few advantages on the company side. One is that it’s very easy to track who has the software because it’s assigned to users. You just have a list of users that have the software assigned to them.

There are some cost benefits, believe it or not. One is that you don’t have to pay for the licenses in full upfront. You can pay a monthly fee if that’s what you prefer.

You also know the software is automatically getting updated, features are automatically getting added. 

And then there’s centralized management, which means that you can often use automated deployment tools to automatically deploy. And, if somebody leaves the organization, you can also remove the license from them as well.

Carolyn Woodard: I think also this move to, I guess, selling the software right to the person who’s going to use it can also mean that the different tools and subscriptions that people at your organization are using, they could just sign up for it themselves. They don’t always have to go through IT. Well, depending on how your IT is set up, you may have it set up so that to be able to use it, you have to let IT know.

Asana Licenses

But a lot of nonprofits have it set up so that if you need a tool, for example if you want to use Asana, you might just sign up for it or your team, your department might sign up for it.

In that case what happens to being able to keep track of everyone and all of their subscriptions?

Pat Sprehe: Yeah, it’s funny that you mentioned Asana because in Asana, any manager can add somebody to a team in Asana, which automatically assigns them a license. There’s not a way I can limit who has been assigned licenses in Asana, except I can basically limit the total number of licenses based on the number that I’ve subscribed to. There are some other issues.

Microsoft and Licenses

Somebody can go and sign up for a personal Microsoft account and start using that Microsoft software under their personal account, which can mean that when they try to save data to OneDrive, they’re saving it to their personal OneDrive.

And there also may be some cost management related to that. So maybe they’re charging that personal Microsoft account to the company credit card, because they just don’t know that we actually have this on the company system, it’s centralized and we have a Microsoft tenant for this organization. So yeah, there’s certainly some places where it can go wrong.

But in general, people come into the organization, so they start working at the organization and they get assigned the licenses that they need, and they just start using the software that they need, and it works pretty smoothly. I do think that just like any other system that people purchase and use, that you do need some procurement management. 

So, you don’t want, I’m going to use you Carolyn, you don’t want your marketing director to go out and buy a subscription to Adobe if you already have an Adobe tenant, and you would rather just buy it as part of the operations department and assign that license to that marketing director.

Why Should You Care About Tracking Subscriptions and Licenses? 

Carolyn Woodard: Thanks for using me as an example, but not that that has ever happened. But I guess this is part of the philosophical question, right? Why do you care?

Does it matter that different departments or different individuals at your nonprofit are going out and purchasing these licenses themselves? And it sounds like to some extent you care, for budget reasons or because you might have an enterprise level license that they should just be using and they might even get more features that way. But to some extent, you might want to encourage those individuals or teams to be entrepreneurial and solve their problems and find the software that’s going to help them in what they need to do to be productive.

Pat Sprehe: Yes. I think in a lot of ways, more than me owning the purchase and management of those licenses, I need to be aware of that. When I’m putting together my budgeting or when I’m setting up a user account or when I’m offboarding a user, I need to know what needs to be assigned, what needs to be removed, both for cost management, which is obviously an issue. But the other one is what I think of as IT footprint management.

Security, compliance, performance optimization, scalability, those kinds of things. I don’t want a mailbox out there that somebody is using and I don’t know about. And then maybe a malicious actor gets access to that and now has control over that mailbox or has control over that product that they can use to get access to other systems. 

I do think, though, that as the internal IT manager, I don’t need to be managing every single system we have. For example, we have a time scheduling app called TimeZest, which our helpdesk uses to schedule sessions with end users that they’re supporting. I’m aware of it, but I don’t have any management access to that. I don’t need it. And so that’s fully managed by our service desk team. But it is a line item in my budget, so I need to make sure that I at least know that it’s there, and that we are paying for it.

How To Track Licenses and Subscriptions

Carolyn Woodard: I think that is one thing that I’ve heard several stories of: new clients who came to us to help them learn what licenses they had that were not being used. Maybe staff who had left, or someone purchased something, set it up as a recurring payment, and then they weren’t using it anymore, but they weren’t noticing that they were still paying for it. So that is important.

Do you have any best practices for non-profits in how to track licenses and subscriptions? Does a spreadsheet work?

Pat Sprehe: A spreadsheet can certainly work. I think one thing you want to make sure you do is you want to have one person who is aware of everything. Often, that’s going to be the finance controller or the CFO.

Hopefully, you have a process for submitting expenses and then a similar process for submitting recurring expenses. So, if you are signing up for a subscription, you would want to make sure that somebody is aware. Especially at a non-profit, you probably want to run that by IT.

It’s really nice when our clients come to us and say, hey, we’re planning on buying some Adobe licenses, and we can say either, “oh, well, you actually already have an Adobe tenant, so we could just add them to this tenant.” Or we can say, “oh, well, actually that organization offers a non-profit discount. We should get the non-profit discount.”

I just worked with an organization that had, for example, an Adobe tenant, but it was not a non-profit tenant. And so, with some of their licenses, we were able to lower the cost of the subscription by renewing with Adobe, or sorry, with a non-profit tenant with Adobe. 

Another example is a client where people were using Grammarly licenses, and everybody had their own Grammarly license. And that very quickly gets very hard to track, whereas the alternative is to get Grammarly for Business, which is basically the same, but the licensing and the user management is centralized in a single platform.

Carolyn Woodard: That makes so much sense. I’m sure that made it so much easier for some people. And I think that’s right. To track subscriptions, you should be able to just go to your vendor list. You could pull that out of the finances and just see what you are paying for. 

Managing Licenses and Subscriptions

You mentioned Adobe a couple of times, and I know that that’s kind of a little bit of a stinker for managing.

Are there other services or products that offer specific challenges to managing their licenses, or have advantages if you manage them more centrally?

Pat Sprehe: I think all of them have advantages if you manage them centrally. It just makes things so much easier.

Adobe is interesting just because it’s kind of tricky to work with Adobe Support. It’s easier to go directly to Adobe Support to get the nonprofit tenant, but it requires some back and forth, and so it’s tedious to set up. Once it’s been set up, it becomes much easier to manage, but it’s that initial setup that can be troublesome.

There are a few vendors that have kind of weird licensing. For example, Asana, where you have to increase and decrease your license count in groups of five. That’s kind of annoying. I would much prefer it if I could just add it user by user. As I mentioned with Asana also, anybody can add somebody to Asana, and now they’re using up one of those licenses. 

So yeah, so every organization or every vendor is a little bit different.

And I think using your Community IT Manager as a resource is great if you have any questions about these kinds of products.

The Value of a Strong Offboarding Process for Staff

Carolyn Woodard: Do you have any last thoughts on or takeaways that you would want people to think about when they’re thinking about managing their subscriptions?

Pat Sprehe: One last thought I would have is to make sure you have a strong offboarding process. That tends to be one place that tends to get overlooked. Often, we look at accounts and look at systems and that the client has a dozen staff that no longer work at the organization, and they’re still paying for those licenses, and they still have what are essentially active accounts for people who are no longer there that they no longer need.

Carolyn Woodard: Yeah, that’s not something you like to see. And I think for security as well, you might have someone who left your organization in a huff, and they still have access to a lot of different subscriptions. So, you want to keep an eye on that too.

So that’s good advice. Well, thank you so much, Pat. I appreciate your time today, helping us figure out how to track subscriptions and licenses.

This was really helpful. Thank you.

Pat Sprehe: My pleasure.