Procurement management startup Greenbax Inc., which does business as Zip, today added a renewal feature to its software that provides procurement and information technology managers with advance notice on pending renewals and automated renewals of licenses and contracts.

Zip said the feature saves companies money and disruption by avoiding automatic renewals at the customer’s option and preventing unanticipated contract expirations. Its automated alerts can be set to notify users of pending renewal dates through email and collaboration software platforms such as Slack Technologies Inc.’s Slack. Zip also said it has achieved SOC 1 Type 2 certification, which validates that customers have the necessary controls in place necessary to meet their Sarbanes-Oxley Act compliance obligations.

Founded in 2020, Zip has raised more than $80 million in venture capital funding and built a base of more than 100 customers. Its platform simplifies the provisioning of software and services, a process that has become more complex with the spread of software-as-a-service applications.

“Purchasing today is so much more decentralized than it was 10 or 20 years ago,” said co-founder and Chief Executive Rujul Zaparde. “It should be easy for me to request what I want without having to be trained on a complicated system.”

Untangling complexity

Using Zip, an individual employee can request a new purchase, answer conditional questions about it and get a visual diagram of the progress of their request as it traverses multifunctional teams. “They can clearly see where the request sits and can get updates over Slack or Teams or email,” Zaparde said. “The company gets an audited view of procurement requests.”

Keeping track of renewals can be a tricky process for companies that have hundreds of thousands of licenses to monitor. Many rely on spreadsheets, which lack automated alerts or workflow functionality. Employees are easily frustrated by procurement procedures that differ by the company or even department.

“For employees, it’s often confusing to find one place to go to for software,” Zaparde said. “Procurement, legal, security, finance and IT may all be involved and it’s a black-box process.”

Unused licenses that renew automatically can incur unnecessary costs while expired licenses can shut down work unexpectedly. Zip allows managers who control budgets to specify when notifications of impending license or contract expirations should be sent. Renewals can be automated with the system remembering all details about the vendor and product from earlier requests.

The service also gives financial professionals visibility into upcoming renewal spending, allowing them to eliminate redundant vendors and renegotiate contracts under better terms.

The Zip Renewals dashboard highlights contract end dates and auto-renewal status, with filtering capabilities and a back-end view into expected renewals for the next two years. It can display several months of upcoming renewals at a glance and monthly reminders can be set for agreements that don’t have renewal dates.

Users can designate notifications to be sent to all stakeholders involved in the renewal process and designate people to notify of a pending renewal if the primary stakeholder leaves the organization

The feature is being added to the core platform at no additional charge. Zip declined to specify pricing information.

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