Pull up your credit card statement and count the software charges. Microsoft 365, Adobe, QuickBooks, Zoom, Dropbox, that project tool someone signed up for in 2022, a second project tool someone signed up for in 2024. Most businesses we work with are paying for 20 to 40 percent more software than they use. Nobody decided to waste that money. It just accumulated.
How the waste happens
Software spend creeps for predictable reasons:
- People leave, licenses stay. An employee quits, someone disables their email, and the paid seat sits there billing every month. We find ex-employee licenses in almost every audit, sometimes for people who left years ago.
- Nobody owns the list. The office manager bought Zoom, the bookkeeper bought QuickBooks, a salesperson expensed a CRM. Each purchase made sense. Nobody can see the total.
- Wrong tier. Everyone got the premium plan because it was easier than deciding who needs what. Three people use the premium features. Fifteen people are on the wrong plan.
- Duplicate tools. Two teams solving the same problem with two products. Dropbox and OneDrive. Slack and Teams. You are paying twice for one job.
- Auto-renewal. Annual contracts renew quietly. The renewal notice went to someone who left, or to spam, and now you are locked in for another year.
The audit
Here is the process. It takes a few hours for a small company and it pays for itself almost every time.
Step one: build the real list. Do not start from memory. Start from money. Export 12 months of credit card and bank transactions and flag every recurring software charge. Then check the app registrations in your Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace admin center, because plenty of tools get signed into with work accounts and paid for elsewhere. You will find things nobody remembered.
Step two: match seats to humans. For each product, pull the user list from its admin panel and put it next to your current employee roster. Every license assigned to someone who no longer works there is instant savings. This step alone usually covers the cost of the audit.
Step three: check actual usage. Most admin panels show last-login dates. A seat that has not been logged into in 90 days is a candidate for removal. A whole product where half the seats are dormant is a candidate for a smaller plan or cancellation.
Step four: check tiers. Does everyone on the top Microsoft 365 plan actually need it, or do most people need email and Office while three people need the advanced security features? Mixing tiers is allowed and normal. The difference per user per month is real money across a year.
Step five: kill duplicates. Pick one file storage tool, one chat tool, one video tool. Migrate the stragglers. This is the politically hardest step and the one with the longest payoff.
Keeping it from creeping back
A one-time audit fixes today. Without process, you are back here in 18 months. The process is short:
- One sheet, one owner. A simple spreadsheet: product, what it is for, cost, number of seats, renewal date, who owns it. One person is responsible for keeping it current. That is the whole system.
- Offboarding checklist. When someone leaves, part of the checklist is "remove or reassign every license." Not just email. Every product on the sheet.
- Renewal reminders. Calendar entry 60 days before each annual renewal. That is your window to renegotiate, downsize, or cancel. Miss it and you are in for another year.
- A door for new purchases. Not a bureaucratic approval chain. Just a rule: new software goes on the sheet before the card gets charged. That is enough to stop most duplicate tools.
How to know it is done right
You should be able to answer three questions in under five minutes: what software do we pay for, what does each one cost per year, and when does each one renew. If the answer lives in one current document, you are done. If the answer is "let me check the bank statement," the creep has already started again.
We run this audit as part of taking over IT for a new client, and it is common for the savings to offset a chunk of our own fee. The money is usually just sitting there, billing quietly, waiting for someone to look.
Stuck on this, or want it done for you? That's the job.
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