YuLife is an insurtech that helps employees live their best lives. YuLife sells group insurance products to businesses on behalf of their employees, bundling them with a health and wellness app that incentives and rewards employees for taking healthy actions – like taking more steps, or meditating.
Edward Lucas has held a Senior Finance role at YuLife for about two years, and has a wide operating purview. He looks after everything from pricing to accounts, payroll, fundraising and more. Edward turned to Cledara to improve visibility, and streamline his workload by delegating responsibility for software subscriptions to individual team members.
"Less of my time is now spent managing software, so I can focus on other things. Keeping track of SaaS is quite laborious – so I really do like the fact that Cledara centralises everything in one place."
YuLife now has 220 staff members across the world. All those people use different software – particularly in the product and tech teams, but also marketing and sales. With no central repository of information about which tools the business was using and paying for, managing that software was becoming arduous for Edward.
"A lot of companies probably use a spreadsheet or a google sheet to keep track of what tools they have and what’s going on, but that’s quite simplistic and very manual,” he explains. “Frankly, there’s a lot of human error that can creep in."
How Cledara helped
Cledara gives Edward the visibility and transparency over software costs that he needs. Now, anyone can log in to the platform, look at the tools YuLife already has, and make an informed decision about whether they really need to buy new software. I oversee the whole P&L, and
“Cledara gives me the visibility and transparency on software I need and ensures me that we’re not wasting money on replicated software.”
The previous lack of visibility was putting a lot of strain on Edward. Before Cledara, YuLife was using one company card to pay for almost everything. Often, Edward had none of the invoices for software purchases, only the credit card statement of what had been spent. The statement gave no indication who owned each product and service that YuLife was paying for, and it was a very manual task to go through each line item every month to reconcile spend.
"If we pay for hundreds of different subscriptions, it’s hard for me as one person to go through and check that all billing details are correct, and that everyone has received payment on time. It’s a waste of time to go into my General Ledger to process and pay every invoice individually."
How Cledara helped
Cledara makes it easy to see which person within the team has ownership for each tool or application. It also gives Edward the ability to delegate the management of software to the subscription owners.
“Cledara allows me to safely delegate to individual owners who control 5 or 10 each, it’s much more efficient. If they’re the tools that they use every day, they can take responsibility for them rather than me hiring more people in finance, which is inefficient.”
Having better visibility leads to better control of software spend. When YuLife was using one credit card for all subscriptions, managing cash flow and maintaining an appropriate software budget was “a bit of a mess”.
For Edward, the real value of Cledara is how easy it makes it to understand, track and manage software spend. Now, he can easily refer to the platform rather than trawling through credit card statements or diving into his General Ledger. Management of software can be pushed out to subscription owners, meaning he only has to maintain oversight.
“If you want to rightsize your software spend and be sure you’re getting value for money, you need Cledara there to give you the data. Before it would have been a very laborious process to collate all that data and understand what we’re spending. Cledara makes that a lot easier.”
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