The 20-minute SaaS spend audit checklist
Studies keep landing on the same range: roughly a third of SaaS spend in mid-sized companies is unused or duplicated. You do not need a procurement department to find most of it. You need twenty focused minutes and this checklist.
Step 1 — Pull the raw list
Export the last 12 months of card and bank transactions, filter for recurring merchants, and group by vendor. Add anything paid by invoice through accounting. You now have a real vendor list, which is almost always longer than the one in anyone's head.
Step 2 — Flag the obvious four
- Tools nobody logged into in 90 days.
- Two tools doing the same job (two schedulers, two analytics suites, two form builders).
- Seats for people who left the company.
- Annual plans that auto-renewed after the project ended.
Step 3 — Check the pricing tier, not just the vendor
Overspend usually hides one level down. You are on the plan you needed at your previous volume, or you bought an enterprise tier for one feature you could get a tier lower. Re-price every vendor above $100/month against your current usage.
Step 4 — Look at payment failures on the other side
If you sell software too, run the same audit in reverse on your own billing: failed payments, expired cards, and involuntary churn are the mirror image of wasted spend and usually bigger.
Step 5 — Make it recurring
A one-off audit decays in about a quarter. Whatever you use — a spreadsheet, a reminder, or an automated auditor running weekly — the value comes from repetition, not from the first pass.