How to run a SaaS audit in one afternoon

Most companies can't say how many software tools they pay for. Subscriptions get bought on corporate cards, expensed by individual teams, and renewed automatically. A SaaS audit fixes that, and it doesn't need a dedicated tool or a procurement team. You need a spreadsheet, access to finance data, and an afternoon.

Step 1: Pull every charge

Start with money, not with what people think they use. Export the last 12 months from:

• Accounts payable or your bill-pay tool (invoices from vendors)
• Every corporate card program
• Expense reports (people often expense tools they bought on personal cards)
• App store and marketplace billing (Google Workspace, Microsoft, AWS, Shopify and similar)

Filter for anything recurring. Annual contracts show up once a year, so 12 months is the minimum window. A shorter one misses them.

Step 2: Build one list

Make one row per tool, with these columns:

Sort by annual cost, largest first. In most companies a small number of tools account for most of the spend, so that's where your time goes.

Step 3: Find the owner for each tool

For every tool without an obvious owner, check who receives the invoice, who's listed as an admin, and whose card it's on. A tool nobody will claim is a strong candidate for cancellation. Before you cancel, export any data you might need.

Step 4: Check real usage

For your top tools, log in to the admin panel and pull the activity report. You're looking for:

• Inactive seats. People who left, never logged in, or haven't logged in for 90 days.
• Overbuying on tier. Teams on an enterprise tier for one feature, such as SSO.
• Read-only users on full seats. Many tools offer cheaper viewer or guest seats.

Some vendors already stop billing inactive users. Slack's fair billing policy is one example (details here). For those, the tier matters more than the seat count.

Step 5: Look for duplicates

Group the list by category and look for two tools doing one job. The usual suspects:

• Video meetings. Zoom on top of Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace, which include Teams or Meet (how to cut this).
• Team chat. Slack alongside Microsoft Teams.
• Docs and wikis. Notion, Confluence and Google Docs all in use (Notion pricing and alternatives).
• Scheduling. Several teams with separate Calendly accounts (Calendly pricing).
• File storage. Dropbox and Box alongside Google Drive or OneDrive.
• Design and whiteboards. Separate Miro, FigJam and Lucid accounts.

Duplicates often come from different teams buying their own accounts. Consolidating them into one company plan usually gets a better per-seat price too.

Step 6: Decide cut, keep or renegotiate

Give every tool in your top 20 one of three labels:

1. Cut. No owner, no usage, or fully covered by another tool. Cancel before the notice date.
2. Keep. Used, priced fairly, nothing to change.
3. Renegotiate. Used, but overbought or overpriced. Right-size the seats or tier at the next renewal.

For the renegotiate pile, the most useful thing to have is a competing quote. See how to negotiate a SaaS renewal for the full playbook.

Step 7: Put renewals on a calendar

Add every renewal to a shared calendar with a reminder 90 days ahead. That's enough time to review usage, collect quotes and give notice. Most overspending on software isn't a bad decision. It's no decision, made by an auto-renewal.

Repeat it

Do this once a year, or every six months if you're growing fast. The second audit takes a fraction of the time, because the list and the owners already exist.

Get bids on your biggest tools

Once you know your top tools and what you pay for each one, you can get competing bids without a sales call. Post an RFP on SaaS RFP with the vendor, your annual spend and the features your team uses, and sellers bid to replace it. If you have many tools, post them all at once. It's free, and you can post anonymously.