The annual SaaS audit that takes two hours and saves thousands

Your company is paying for software no one remembers signing up for. I know this because I’ve run this exercise for a dozen clients and it’s true every single time.

The pattern: someone on the team needed a tool for a project two years ago, put it on the company card, the project wrapped, the person left or moved roles, the subscription kept renewing. Multiply that by every tool your team has tried since 2020 and you’ve got $500–2,000/month walking out the door.

The fix is a two-hour audit, once a year. Not a vendor engagement, not a software discovery platform, just you and your bank statements.

How to run it

Pull up your credit card and bank statements for the last three months. Open a spreadsheet. Make four columns: Service, Monthly Cost, Owner, Keep/Cancel.

Go line by line. Every SaaS charge gets a row. If you see a company name you don’t recognize, Google it. Half the time it’s a rebranded service you forgot about (Wistia shows up as “WST*” on some statements).

For each one, answer two questions:

1. Who on the team actually uses this? Not who could use it. Who logged in last month.
2. What breaks if we cancel it? Be specific. “Marketing needs it” isn’t an answer. “The contact form on our website routes through this” is.

If you can’t answer both questions in under 60 seconds, mark it Cancel and move on. You can always resubscribe if someone screams.

What you’ll find

Three categories show up every time:

Zombie subscriptions. Tools tied to employees who left, trials that auto-converted, one-off projects that ended. These are pure waste. Cancel them today.

Overlap. You’re paying for Zapier, Make, and n8n because different people picked different automation tools. You’re paying for Loom and Riverside because one team records demos and another does podcasts. Consolidate where it makes sense, but don’t force it if the switching cost is real work.

Upgrades you don’t need. Someone upgraded your Slack plan to Enterprise because they wanted SAML, but you’re a twelve-person company and no one actually turned on SAML. Downgrade.

The math: the median client saves about $1,200/month on this exercise. High was $3,400. Low was $350, but they’d done this the year before.

The one exception

If a tool costs under $20/month and someone on the team says they use it, keep it. The cost of the conversation about canceling it exceeds the annual savings. Just note who owns it in the spreadsheet so you’re not having this discussion again next year.

What to do after

This shouldn’t be a one-time event. Set a calendar reminder for the same week every year. Block two hours. Run it again.

Between audits: appoint one person (usually whoever touches the company card most often) as the subscription gatekeeper. New SaaS sign-ups require a Slack message to that person with three pieces of information: what it is, what it costs, who owns it. That’s it. Not permission, just logging.

The goal isn’t bureaucracy. It’s knowing what you’re paying for without needing to grep your bank statements.