This is the audit I run for clients, written out so you can do it yourself with a spreadsheet and an afternoon. It takes about 45 minutes for a small business, and it reliably finds money — usually before you get to the interesting part.
You need two things: access to the card or bank statement the subscriptions are billed to, and admin access to each tool.
Step 1 — Find everything (15 minutes)
Start from the money, not from memory. Nobody remembers every subscription, and the forgotten ones are exactly where the waste is.
- Export the last 12 months of card and bank statements, then filter for recurring charges. Twelve months, not three — annual renewals are the easiest to miss and often the largest.
- Search email for "receipt", "invoice", "your subscription" and "trial ending".
- Check every card, including personal cards used "just to get started" two years ago.
- Ask each team lead what they pay for. Departmental spending on a manager's card is the single most common blind spot.
Expect a surprise. Most businesses under 30 people find at least one subscription nobody could account for. Finding two is normal.
Step 2 — Build the sheet (10 minutes)
One row per tool. These are the columns that matter — the last four are the ones most audits skip, and they're where the decisions actually come from.
| Column | Why it's there |
|---|---|
| Tool | Name and what it's actually for, in your words. |
| Owner | The person who would notice if it vanished. If nobody would, that's your answer. |
| Billing | Monthly or annual, and the renewal date. |
| Cost/month | Annual plans divided by 12, so everything is comparable. |
| Seats paid | From the invoice, not from the team roster. |
| Seats active in 30 days | From the admin panel's last-login data. The gap between this and the previous column is free money. |
| Workaround hours/month | Time the team spends exporting, re-keying or reconciling because of this tool. The most valuable column in the sheet. |
| Data exportable? | Yes / partly / no. Determines how hard leaving would be, whether or not you plan to. |
| Price change in 24 months | Predicts what the next 24 months will do. |
| Verdict | Keep / trim / replace / cancel. |
Step 3 — Ask six questions per row (15 minutes)
- Who logged in this month? Not who has an account — who used it. Almost every admin panel shows last login. Filter, count, compare to what you pay for.
- What happens if we cancel it tomorrow? If the honest answer is "we'd export the data and use a spreadsheet," you have found a tool to cancel, not one to replace.
- What does it not do? Write down the specific gap. Vague dissatisfaction is not actionable; "it can't split a job across two crews" is.
- What do we do by hand because of it? Ask the people doing the work, not the person who bought the tool. They'll have a list.
- Could we get our data out today? Try it. Actually click export and look at the file. Half the time the result is missing the relationships between records.
- What did this cost two years ago? A tool that has risen 40% will keep rising.
Step 4 — Sort and decide (5 minutes)
Add a column for true monthly cost: the subscription plus workaround hours multiplied by a loaded hourly rate. Sort by it descending. The order will not match the invoice order, and the top two or three rows are the whole conversation.
The four verdicts
- Cancel. Nobody logs in, or the job it does has stopped existing. Do this today.
- Trim. Right tool, wrong seat count or wrong tier. The fastest saving available and it requires no project.
- Keep. It works, it's fairly priced, the gaps are minor. Most rows should land here.
- Replace. High true cost, growing with headcount, and a specific gap you can describe. Usually one or two rows, occasionally none.
Do the trimming before the building. Cancelling dead seats takes an afternoon and pays immediately. A rebuild takes months. If you start with the exciting option you'll leave the easy money on the table for another year.
Red flags worth acting on
- Paid seats exceed active seats by more than 15%. You're funding turnover you never processed.
- Workaround hours cost more than the subscription. The tool is now a net negative regardless of its price.
- You're on a higher tier for one feature. Price the feature on its own; sometimes a $30 add-on replaces a $2,000/year tier jump.
- Export produces something you can't reassemble. That's lock-in, and it gets worse every month.
- Nobody can name the owner. Unowned tools are almost always cancellable.
What to do with the result
Cancel and trim immediately — that's usually 5–15% of the total bill for no risk. Then take the one or two "replace" rows and run them through the build-vs-buy checklist and the break-even calculator. If either says no, you've still had a profitable afternoon.
And if you'd rather not do it yourself, this is exactly what the free audit is: send the invoices and the seat counts, and you get the same sheet back with the analysis done.