SaaS Spend Audit: Find and Cut Unused Subscriptions

No single source has the full list, so combine several and reconcile:

1. Card and bank statements. Search the last twelve months for recurring charges. This catches most subscriptions bought by employees.
2. Accounts payable and expense reports. Invoices paid by check or transfer, and expenses employees reimbursed themselves.
3. Your single sign-on or identity provider. The list of connected apps shows tools people log into, even if they're on free plans that hold company data.
4. Email search. Look for receipts, renewal notices and "welcome" messages from vendors.
5. A quick team survey. Ask each department to list the tools they use. You'll find things the other sources missed.

Put the results in one sheet with a row per tool: vendor, purpose, owner, monthly or annual cost, billing method, renewal date, notice period and number of paid seats. Unowned tools are a finding by themselves.

Cost tells you what matters financially; usage tells you what to cut. For each tool that costs real money, compare paid seats with active users:

• Ask the vendor's admin console for last-login dates and active users over the past 90 days.
• Flag seats belonging to people who've left, changed roles or haven't logged in for a quarter.
• Note overlaps, such as two project tools, two video tools or two survey tools.
• Ask the owner what business outcome the tool supports, and whether that outcome still exists.

Say a tool costs $12,000 a year for 40 seats and only 22 people logged in during the last three months. That's a candidate to downsize at renewal, with a message to the inactive users first. Be careful with tools used rarely but critically, like a compliance or emergency system. Low logins there don't mean waste.

Also watch security: unused accounts with access to company data are a risk in themselves, so deprovision them even when the cost is small.

Give every tool one of four outcomes, and write down the reason:

• Keep when usage is high and the tool has a named owner.
• Downsize when seats or plan tier exceed usage. Ask the vendor for a lower tier or fewer seats at renewal.
• Consolidate when two tools do the same job. Choose the one people prefer, move the data and cancel the other.
• Cancel when nobody uses it or the need has gone away. Export data first.

Sequence the actions by renewal date, not by size alone. A large contract that renews in ten months can wait, while a mid-size one renewing next month is urgent, especially if it has a notice window. Use the renewal date and notice period from your inventory, and start negotiations before the notice deadline; vendors often respond better when you have a specific alternative or a lower seat count. The operations audit checklist is useful for spotting other waste beyond software.

Otherwise the sprawl regrows within a year. Put a few standing rules in place:

• One approval path for new software, whatever the price, with a short question set: what problem, who owns it, what data it will hold, is there an existing tool.
• Virtual cards per vendor with limits, so charges are visible and a forgotten trial can't renew unnoticed.
• Offboarding step that removes the departing employee's seats and access in the same week.
• Renewal calendar reviewed monthly, with notice deadlines highlighted.
• Quarterly usage check on the ten largest tools.

Spend management tools can automate much of this: Ramp is often used for card controls and spotting duplicate or underused software, while Procurify adds request approvals and budgets before a purchase. Compare them in Procurify vs Coupa vs Ramp and Procurify vs Ramp for tech startups, and confirm what each does with your data before connecting anything.

Report in three numbers: annual spend reviewed, annual spend removed or reduced, and spend still unowned. Don't promise a savings percentage in advance, because it depends entirely on how tidy your stack already is. A team that has never audited will usually find more waste than one that reviews every quarter.

Keep the comparison honest. Count only savings that appear on future invoices, and subtract any migration effort or replacement cost. Software is one part of a larger cost base: payroll averages 19.49% of revenue for US firms with fewer than 500 employees¹, so software savings matter most when they fund something specific or free up cash, not as an end in themselves.

Share the summary with department heads, thank the people who reported unused tools and schedule the next audit before you close this one.