---
title: "A software spend audit checklist for a company with no finance team"
description: "Pull twelve months of vendor spend, rank it, and find annual charges, duplicates, seat creep and owners. A checklist you can finish in an afternoon."
canonical: "https://lopifi.com/savings/how-to/software-spend-audit-checklist"
---

# A software spend audit checklist for a company with no finance team

> Pull twelve months of vendor spend, rank it, and find annual charges, duplicates, seat creep and owners. A checklist you can finish in an afternoon.

Source: https://lopifi.com/savings/how-to/software-spend-audit-checklist
Part of: Lopifi — US GAAP books on autopilot, checked by a CPA (https://lopifi.com)

---

Series: Find the spend. Reviewed 2026-10-25.

An audit is a list with five columns and a decision per row. The work is getting an honest list and finding an owner for every line. This checklist is the order we use, so nothing is decided before the list is complete.

## Run your numbers

- [Software spend per employee](https://lopifi.com/md/tools/spend-per-head): Total software spend turned into a yearly figure, a cost per person and a share of revenue, with what a trim is worth.
- [Unused seat cost](https://lopifi.com/md/tools/seat-waste): Paid seats against seats in use: what the idle ones cost a year, and what you save by right-sizing at renewal.

## What to pull, in this order

Start from the money, not from memory. People remember the tools they like; the books remember the ones they pay for. Pull three sources and merge them into one sheet with one row per vendor.

1. **The vendor report from your books.** Run the vendor report for twelve months: [QuickBooks Online](https://lopifi.com/md/savings/how-to/find-software-in-quickbooks) or [Xero](https://lopifi.com/md/savings/how-to/find-software-in-xero). Export it. This is the spine of the list.
2. **The card and bank lines.** Open the company card and bank accounts and read the same twelve months line by line. Software that never became a bill lives here. [Finding the ones you forgot](https://lopifi.com/md/savings/how-to/find-card-subscriptions-you-forgot) covers how to read the descriptors.
3. **The admin consoles.** List what is actually switched on: the admin page of your email suite and any single sign-on tool, and the billing page of each large vendor. A tool you can sign in to but never see on a statement is paid for elsewhere, or by a person on an expense claim.

## The five columns

Everything below is read off those five columns. Do not add more until you have filled these for every row.

- Vendor and what it is for, in a few words. If you cannot say what it is for, that is the finding.
- Annual cost: what the vendor is paid across twelve months, including annual plans that hit once.
- Billing rhythm and renewal date: monthly or annual, and the date the next charge or the notice deadline falls. The [cancelling guide](https://lopifi.com/md/savings/how-to/cancel-without-penalties) says why the notice date matters more than the renewal date.
- Seats: how many are paid for and how many people signed in recently, from the vendor's own admin page.
- Owner: one named person who decides whether the tool stays.

## What each column tells you

Sample, invented, to show the arithmetic: a SAMPLE chat tool bills 12 seats at $8 per seat per month, so $96 a month and $1,152 a year. If 9 people signed in during the last 90 days, 3 seats are unused: 3 x $8 x 12 = $288 a year that buys nothing. That is the size of the gap, not an estimate of what you will save, since the plan's own terms decide whether seats can come off mid-term.

- Annual cost sorts the list. The top handful of rows usually matter more than the long tail, so decide those first.
- A renewal date inside the next quarter sets the order of work. A row with a notice deadline in three weeks goes to the top regardless of size.
- Seats paid minus seats in use is per-seat creep. Plans priced per user keep charging for people who left or never started. This gap is the easiest reduction because nothing changes for anyone still working.
- A row with no owner is a row nobody will defend and nobody will cancel. Assign one before anything else.

## Duplicates and annual charges

Look at the annual lines first. They are the largest single charges and the easiest to cancel on time, because the deadline is a date you can calendar.

- Two tools doing one job (two chat apps, two video tools, two file stores). Mark them; [consolidating into the suite you already pay for](https://lopifi.com/md/savings/how-to/consolidate-into-one-suite) is the next step.
- The same tool under two cards, a personal plan and a team plan, or a trading name and a legal name. Merge these rows and total them.
- Annual plans paid in advance. In the books they are a [prepaid expense](https://lopifi.com/md/glossary/prepaid-expense) that releases month by month, so the saving arrives at renewal, not the day you stop using the tool.
- Free trials that converted. A charge with no one's name on it, starting a year ago, is usually one.

## What to do with the list

Give every row one of four marks: keep, shrink (fewer seats or a smaller plan), replace, or cancel. Do the shrink and cancel marks first; they need no migration. Replacements follow the pattern in the [Dropbox migration guide](https://lopifi.com/md/savings/how-to/dropbox-migration), with a pilot, a verified copy and a month of overlap.

To rank the list by what each line costs and how replaceable we rate the app, open the [free audit](https://lopifi.com/savings/audit), choose the export or paste the vendor and total columns. It runs in your browser and sends nothing anywhere.

## Common questions

### How far back should the pull go?

Twelve months, so a plan billed once a year shows up. Anything shorter hides the largest single lines. If your books are younger than a year, use all of it and note that annual plans may not have billed yet.

### What if nobody knows who owns a tool?

Do not guess and do not cancel. Search the card and bank accounts for the name, ask in the team channel who uses it, and look for a login in the admin console of your email suite. If nobody claims it after a fair ask, put a date on it, tell the team, and turn it off or downgrade it inside the contract's notice window.

### Do I need to connect my books to do this?

No. The free audit reads an exported file or pasted columns in your browser and sends nothing anywhere. The checklist works the same with a spreadsheet and no tool at all.

### How often should we repeat it?

Once a year at minimum, a month before your largest annual renewals, and whenever the team changes size by a lot. The first pass takes the longest; later passes are comparing against the last list.

## Keep going

- [Forgotten card subscriptions](https://lopifi.com/md/savings/how-to/find-card-subscriptions-you-forgot): Find software charges hidden behind processor names on your card or bank feed: read descriptors, set bank rules, and know who to ask about unknowns.
- [Negotiating a renewal](https://lopifi.com/md/savings/how-to/negotiate-a-saas-renewal): Build a renewal calendar from your books, bring usage evidence, right-size first, and ask for the terms and billing flexibility that matter.
- [Find it in QuickBooks Online](https://lopifi.com/md/savings/how-to/find-software-in-quickbooks): Run the vendor-totals report in QuickBooks Online, export it, and see every software line ranked by cost, in minutes and without connecting anything.
- [Find it in Xero](https://lopifi.com/md/savings/how-to/find-software-in-xero): Use Xero's expenses-by-contact reporting to total spend by supplier, export it, and rank your software lines. No connection; nothing leaves your browser.
- [Run the free audit](https://lopifi.com/savings/audit)
- [All how-to guides](https://lopifi.com/md/savings/how-to)

*General information, not tax, legal or accounting advice.*