Two independent 2026 analyses put SaaS overspend at 25 to 30 percent of what companies pay (CloudNuro, January 2026; Block64, February 2026). OpenIT reported in August that about 51% of software licenses go underused (OpenIT).
Treat those as industry averages. Your firm’s number could land above or below them, and counting is the one way to learn it.
Set aside four or five afternoons over a week. You need your statements and a spreadsheet, plus admin access to the tools your firm pays for.
Step 1: Pull twelve months of charges
Collect every source that can hold a software payment:
- Company credit card statements
- Bank debits and accounts payable
- App store receipts on company devices
- Expense reports, because staff put tools on personal cards and claim them back
Search each statement for words such as subscription, annual and renewal, and for vendor names you half recognize. Charges from app marketplaces and payment processors can hide the real product name, so trace those back to the tool.
Use twelve months so the annual plans, which charge once a year, show up in the pile.
Step 2: Put every tool on one sheet
Create one row per tool with these columns:
| Tool | Monthly cost | Annual cost | Renewal date | Seats paid | Owner | |—|—|—|—|—|—|
Leave the owner column blank when you don’t know. Every blank marks a tool no one at your firm answers for, and those rows go to the top of the review.
Step 3: Count who logs in
Open each tool’s admin console and look for last-login dates. Mark every paid seat with no login in the past 90 days.
If a tool doesn’t show login data, ask the person in the owner column. For rows with a blank owner, ask the people you think use it and write down what they tell you.
Unused seats are the easiest savings in this audit. You cancel them without changing how anyone works.
Step 4: Find two tools doing one job
Add a column for what each tool does and sort by it. Use labels such as file sharing, video calls, e-signature, project tracking and password management.
Start with the largest suite your firm pays for. An office productivity plan can include file storage, video calls and chat, which turns a separate tool in any of those groups into a duplicate.
Two tools under one label deserve a hard look. Firms pick up duplicates when one department chooses a tool and another department chooses a different one a year later.
For each pair, compare active users and contract terms. Keep the one more people use, and plan the move for the other users.
For client audits I use a tool I built that groups software by capability, flags the overlaps and totals what consolidating would save. You can do the same grouping by hand in a spreadsheet; it takes longer.
Step 5: Decide, then protect the decision
Give every tool one of three labels: keep, cut or consolidate.
- Cut tools before their next renewal date, and get the cancellation confirmed in writing.
- Consolidate on a schedule. Moving a team between tools takes planning, so set a target date for each move.
- Keep the rest, and put each renewal date on a shared calendar 60 days ahead.
Name one person responsible for the sheet, and repeat the audit every six months. Staff add tools one reasonable purchase at a time, and the sheet falls out of date between audits.
What you end up with
At the end of the audit you hold one sheet that shows every tool, its cost, its owner and its renewal date. That sheet may be the first complete view of software spend your firm has had, and it turns the next budget meeting into a review of named line items.
If you’d rather not spend the afternoons
I run this audit as part of the Technology + AI Assessment, which takes two to three weeks and costs $6,500, credited in full against the first month if you start a retainer within 30 days. Details are at b4help.com. If you want to talk it through first, book a free call.