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Are You Maximising The Value Of Your Software Subscriptions?

Keeping track of all the current software subscriptions you have for your business can be difficult; and knowing what products and services are included within those subscriptions can become overwhelming.

With package subscriptions such as Microsoft Office 365, the products and services which are included change depending on the type of licence you own. Additionally, these packaged products can be updated by the provider to include even more apps and tools as they are developed and released.

Why Monitor Active Subscriptions?

Monitoring your active subscriptions and their inclusions can potentially increase your overall efficiency and productivity by leveraging those included, but not well marketed features. One example of this is a Microsoft tool called Spreadsheet Compare. Spreadsheet Compare is included with selected Office subscriptions but is relatively unknown and often overlooked. Spreadsheet Compare allows you to easily compare two Excel workbooks and display the differences between them line by line and cell by cell. It highlights all differences including values, formulas, and formatting. All regular users of Excel know it can be difficult and time-consuming to find what has changed in a given workbook if you have been required to restore a previous version of a workbook or have had multiple individuals edit and save different versions of a workbook and it is now your job to bring all of those separate changes together into a single file.

In addition to the potential of improving efficiency, it is also important to track active subscriptions to ensure that they remain relevant to your current business needs. It is all too common for a business to have applications which are no longer being used that they continue paying a subscription for. This can commonly occur when an alternative is adopted or the employee that introduced the application and its related subscription leaves the business or transitions to a different role.

How Can You Maximise Your Value & Efficiency?

The lack of knowledge around common tools, such as the Spreadsheet Compare example given above, is a large contributor to companies squandering valuable employee time on repetitive and tedious tasks. Often, as is the case for Spreadsheet Compare, these tools are not difficult to use and do not even require any additional installation. The best approach to maximising the value from your subscriptions, and prevent unnecessary time wastage, is to regularly audit them – confirming which applications it covers, who is using those applications, and if there have been any additions or features made to those applications that you could begin utilising.

Alternatively, you could engage with systems and process experts like those here in the Altitude Innovations Team to determine if there are better ways for you to complete tedious and time-consuming tasks, whilst also ensuring you are not paying for software subscriptions that you no longer need.

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