From helping autonomous shipping vessels navigate when their GPS fails, to finding a new ingredient to replace the bulk fillers in chocolate, to figuring out how to automate corporate tax filing systems.
That’s what Oliver Page does at the UK venture builder The Bakery.
He tells us they are all about helping corporations innovate around the globe. And he uses Cledara to manage the SaaS subscriptions that enable both their London team and their Brazil subsidiary to do so.
Let’s jump in to understand the challenges he encountered and how they leveraged Cledara to solve them.
“Cledara is exceptionally helpful because, for me, it is one of those applications that you can basically have in the background. You don't need to spend a lot of time with it and it just helps you save time.”
Oliver tells us they’ve had a number of challenges related to software as their team grew bigger that they didn’t really have back in the day.
“When we were a very small business, everyone kind of got on with it. There wasn't a very rigid hierarchy or a rigid structure to the business. When team members would need something, they would get the company card details and sign up for it.”
That’s something that might sound natural, but it’s a matter of time before it becomes unmanageable.
“Company cards were too freely and widely used without a clear view of what they were used for”, Oliver recalled. “We didn't know what they were paying for. In fact, we’d find out only after a few months that we were paying for a bunch of things we had no idea about.”
Oliver tells us that the LinkedIn premium accounts were one of the reasons why they looked for a tool like Cledara.
“We had a number of team members who had signed up for individual LinkedIn premium accounts when they joined. When they left the business, we found that we had these lingering, unaccounted for licenses we were still paying for.”
And they weren’t able to cancel any of them.
“LinkedIn would not tell us who these charges were associated with, nor could we block the charges,” he says. “We even tried canceling the cards to stop the charges, and then somehow, LinkedIn managed to transfer those subscriptions onto the replacement cards. There was literally nothing we could do to stop paying”.
“We needed to keep better track of our software spend and who needed what in the first place”, Oliver says. “We couldn’t really track it, which made it very hard to evaluate our software consumption budget”.
That’s where Cledara came in.
How Cledara helped
“Thanks to Cledara, there's an accountability trail. Now we can ask “What is this charge?”, then go back to the person and ask them “Is this necessary?”, and if it’s not, we can cut it.”
This visibility has allowed Oliver’s team to reevaluate SaaS investments in a predictable way. “Cledara allowed us to reset many of our SaaS expenditures, re-evaluate what we were spending money on, and gradually load applications and new cards onto the Cledara platform”, he says.
“Cledara is exceptionally helpful because, for me, it is one of those applications that you can basically have in the background.”
“You don't need to spend a lot of time with it and it just helps you save time, rather than one of the many applications which claim to save you time and effort but just end up taking a significant amount of time to keep ticking over.”
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