You don't know what you're spending on software. Don't be embarrassed — almost nobody does. Subscriptions accrete one signup at a time, charged to whoever happened to be the credit card on file, then forgotten until renewal.
The good news: a real audit takes four hours, and the median team finds 30–40% of their SaaS spend is killable. Often by lunchtime. Here's the playbook.
Hour 1: The pull.
Open your company credit card statement for the last 3 months. Filter for recurring charges. You're looking for everything in the $20–500/month range that hits monthly or annually.
Make a spreadsheet with five columns: Tool · Owner · Cost/mo · Used by · Last actually opened.
Don't try to remember. Look at the statement. You'll find subscriptions you forgot existed. Most teams find 4–6 zombie subscriptions in this step alone. Cancel them today and you've already paid for the audit.
Hour 2: The usage check.
For each remaining tool, open the admin panel. Find “active users last 30 days” or equivalent. Compare to seat count.
You're looking for two things:
- Inactive seats. If you have 12 seats but 7 active users, you have 5 seats you're paying for that nobody touches. Most vendors let you reduce seat count at the next billing cycle.
- Overlapping tools. If two tools are doing 70% the same job (Notion + Confluence, Asana + Monday, Mailchimp + ConvertKit), one of them has to die. Hold a 10-minute meeting; pick which.
Hour 3: The category review.
Group the remaining tools by category. CRM. HR. Accounting. Projects. Helpdesk. Marketing.
In each category, ask three questions:
- How much are we paying? Add it up.
- What % of features are we using? Open the product, scroll the sidebar, count how many sections you've used in the last 30 days vs total.
- What would it cost to replace this with a “good-enough” alternative? Look at the lower-tier or competing products in the same category.
The honest answer in 70% of cases is: you're using a $90/month tool that does what a $20/month tool also does, because somebody set it up when you had different needs.
Hour 4: The consolidation play.
Now the bigger question: how many separate categories do you actually need separate tools for?
Most 10-person teams discover that 6–9 of their 12 SaaS tools are categories that one all-in-one platform can replace. CRM, HR, accounting, projects, support, marketing, bookings, contracts — these are all categories that bundle reasonably well now.
You don't have to commit to consolidation today. Just do the math:
- What is the combined monthly bill across the consolidate-able categories?
- What would the all-in-one cost (Mewayz $149, Zoho $35-per-user, Odoo varies)?
- What's the migration cost — really, honestly — for the categories you'd switch?
In our audits of customers who switched to Mewayz, the median monthly saving was $680. The median migration time was 11 days — usually one weekend of focused effort. Payback under a month.
What you'll find.
Three patterns we see in nearly every audit:
- Zombies (5–15% of spend). Subscriptions for people who left, products you stopped using, trials that converted. Free money to recover.
- Over-tier (10–25% of spend). You're on Pro when Starter would cover what you actually use. The vendor will never tell you.
- Over-fragmentation (20–40% of spend). The big one. You're paying retail across 8 tools to cover what one platform could do at 1/6 the price.
Even if you don't consolidate to an all-in-one, the first two patterns alone usually find $300–600/month of recoverable spend on a 10-person team. That's $4K–7K/year you could redirect to almost anything that matters more than software vendors.
The follow-up.
Do this audit once a quarter. Calendar it. The subscription accretion is automatic — your audit needs to be.
Or, run it once, switch to an all-in-one, and never have to do it again. (Look, we had to mention us once.)