How to Audit Your SaaS Stack in One Afternoon

By Abraham Chera | Profit Recovery Consultant | SyBoost

Most companies have no single place that lists every software tool they are paying for. That is the first problem, and it is the problem this process solves.

When I run a technology audit as part of a profit recovery engagement, one of the most consistent findings is that nobody -- not the founder, not the CFO, not IT -- has a complete, current picture of what the company is actually paying for. Tools get added by individual team members on business credit cards. Annual subscriptions renew automatically and disappear into the accounting as a single line item. Department leads accumulate their own stacks without coordination. By the time I pull everything together, the total is almost always a surprise.

For a $3M to $10M company, you can replicate this process yourself in an afternoon.

"Nobody cancelled the subscription because nobody knew they owned it. That is how companies spend $140,000 a year on software nobody uses."

Start with your credit card and bank statements for the past three months and export every recurring software charge. Then search your email for "receipt" and "invoice" going back 12 months -- you will find tools you forgot existed. Finally, ask your finance team to pull from your accounting software everything categorized as software, subscriptions, or tools.

The goal of this step is completeness. Do not filter anything out yet. The point is to see the full picture before making any decisions about it.

For each tool, record five things: the monthly cost (normalize all annual subscriptions to a monthly equivalent), the annual total, who originally approved it, the primary use case in one sentence, and the number of active users from the last 30 days. That last data point comes from the tool's admin panel -- virtually every SaaS tool with multiple seats shows last-login data per user.

Create this in a simple spreadsheet. You need to be able to sort it by cost, by category, and by active user count.

The Three-Question Test

For each tool, ask three questions. First: who owns this tool? If you cannot name a specific person who is accountable for it, it is an immediate cut candidate. Second: what would break in your operations if you removed it tomorrow? The honest answer to this question is often "not much." Third: is there another tool you already pay for that covers this function?

Tools that fail the first question, have a weak answer to the second, or have a yes to the third are your cut list. In most $3M to $10M companies, 20 to 40% of the stack falls into one of these three categories.

Divide the monthly cost of each tool by its number of active users. Any tool over $200 per active user per month deserves scrutiny unless it is mission-critical infrastructure. A $600 per month project management tool used actively by only two people is a $300 per seat tool -- the kind of cost that looks unremarkable on an invoice but is easy to eliminate or consolidate once you see it this way.

"Cost per active user is the single most clarifying number in a software audit. It converts abstract subscription fees into a number anyone can evaluate."

In a typical $5M company, this process identifies $5,000 to $12,000 per month in cuttable or consolidatable software spend -- $60,000 to $144,000 annually. The cuts almost always come from four to six tools, not from eliminating anything core. Nobody misses the duplicate project management tool. Nobody notices when the analytics platform they used twice last year goes away.

For the more detailed version of this process -- including how to map functional overlaps across your entire stack -- see Technology Stack Audit: Step-by-Step Guide. For the full context on how software waste fits into the broader picture of operational profit recovery, see The Hidden 8%: How Growing Companies Leak Profit Without Knowing It.

--- Abraham Chera is the founder of SyBoost, a profit recovery consultancy serving businesses between $1M and $20M in revenue.