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

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.

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 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.

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.

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 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 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.

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, 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, choose the export or paste the vendor and total columns. It runs in your browser and sends nothing anywhere.