How software spend gets away from you
Nobody decides to waste money on SaaS. It accumulates: a tool someone trialled and forgot, seats for people who left last year, two products doing the same job because two teams never talked, renewals that auto-charge a card nobody checks. Individually small. Together, I've seen it reach tens of thousands a year at companies with fewer than fifty staff.
There's a security angle too. Every forgotten app with company data and live logins for ex-employees is a finding waiting for your next audit. When I ran this exercise as part of an ISO 27001 program, the offboarding gaps worried me more than the money did.
What I do
- Full inventory of every subscription, from finance data, SSO logs and the questions nobody asked
- Usage audit: seats paid for versus seats actually used
- Duplicate and overlap analysis, with a keep/kill/consolidate call on each
- A renewal calendar with an owner against every app
- An offboarding checklist wired into your leaver process, so access actually gets revoked
What you get
A one-page savings summary with the cancellations already actioned where you've approved them, plus the register and renewal calendar to keep it from growing back. Typical recovery is 10–20% of total SaaS spend.