SaaS Spend Audit: How to Find Hidden Subscriptions (Step-by-Step)

Most companies don't know what they're spending on software.

Not roughly — precisely. The number is usually higher than anyone expects, spread across more tools than anyone remembers approving, billed across multiple credit cards, invoiced in multiple currencies, and owned by nobody in particular.

A SaaS spend audit changes that. It takes two to four hours the first time. After that, it's a 30-minute quarterly habit.

Here's exactly how to do it.

Why SaaS Spend Gets Out of Control

SaaS made it easy to buy software. A credit card and a two-minute signup form. No IT approval. No procurement process. No one keeping count.

That's useful when you're moving fast. It becomes a problem when you're not sure what you're paying for — or whether anyone's still using it.

The typical pattern:

Tools get added one at a time, each justified individually
Billing happens quietly in the background
No one audits the total
The number compounds year on year

According to Zylo's 2024 SaaS Management Index, the average company wastes 26% of its SaaS spend on unused or underused tools. For a team spending $100k on software, that's $26k sitting idle.

A spend audit finds it.

Before You Start: What You're Looking For

A SaaS spend audit has three goals:

Visibility — know every tool you're paying for and how much
Waste — identify tools with low or zero adoption
Risk — find contracts with upcoming renewals or auto-renewal clauses

You don't need to cancel everything you find. You need to make deliberate decisions rather than letting contracts drift.

Step 1: Pull Every Payment Source

Start with the money, not the tools.

SaaS charges hide across multiple sources. Check all of them:

Company credit cards — the most common place. Export 12 months of statements and search for recurring charges
Bank statements — direct debits and wire transfers for annual contracts
Expense reports — tools approved through individual expenses that never got centralised
Accounts payable — invoices from vendors paid by finance directly
App stores — Apple Business Manager, Google Play for Work, Microsoft Store

Flag every recurring charge that looks like a software subscription. Don't filter yet — just collect.

Step 2: Build Your Inventory

Create a single list with one row per tool. At minimum, capture:

Vendor name
What it does (one sentence)
Annual cost (convert everything to annual for comparison)
Billing cycle — monthly, quarterly, or annual
Payment source — which card or account
Contract owner — who approved it or uses it
Renewal date
Cancellation notice period
Number of licensed seats

If you don't have this already, a spreadsheet works fine for a first audit. The goal is to get everything in one place.

Use our SaaS spend calculator to total it up once you have the list — seeing the annual number in one place is often the most clarifying moment of the whole exercise.

Step 3: Check Actual Usage

A tool on the list isn't necessarily a tool being used.

For each subscription, check:

Active users — most SaaS admin dashboards show last login dates and active seat counts. Anything with fewer than 50% of seats actively used is a candidate for right-sizing or cancellation
Last activity — tools where the most recent login was more than 90 days ago deserve scrutiny
Overlapping functionality — two tools doing the same job in different departments. This is more common than most teams expect

Questions worth asking for each tool:

Who uses this, specifically?
What would we lose if it went away tomorrow?
Is there something else we already pay for that covers this?

Step 4: Flag Upcoming Renewals

Cross-reference your inventory against the calendar.

For every contract, calculate:

Renewal date
Cancellation deadline (renewal date minus notice period)
Days until cancellation deadline

Any contract with a cancellation deadline within 90 days needs immediate attention — especially if you haven't reviewed usage yet.

Missing a cancellation window on a tool you're not using is expensive. Missing one on a tool you were planning to renegotiate is a missed opportunity.

If this feels manual, it is. This is the part a tool like Termedora handles automatically — tracking every renewal date and sending escalating reminders at 90, 60, and 30 days so nothing slips.

Step 5: Categorise and Prioritise

Group your inventory by category to spot patterns:

Productivity — docs, project management, task tracking
Communication — email, chat, video
Development — hosting, monitoring, CI/CD, code tools
Marketing — CRM, email marketing, analytics, ads
Finance — accounting, payroll, expense management
Security — password management, SSO, endpoint protection
HR — HRIS, recruiting, learning

Common findings:

Two or three project management tools running in parallel across different teams
Multiple analytics platforms with overlapping data
Communication tools nobody migrated away from after switching to something newer

Consolidation opportunities are often visible at the category level before they're obvious at the tool level.

Step 6: Make Decisions

For each tool, assign one of four outcomes:

Keep — actively used, value is clear, renewal makes sense at current terms Renegotiate — used, but pricing is high relative to usage or alternatives. Flag for a negotiation conversation before the next renewal. See our guide to negotiating SaaS renewals for how to approach these. Downgrade — used, but fewer seats or features than currently licensed. Right-size the plan. Cancel — unused, redundant, or no longer justified. Submit cancellation notice within the required notice period.

Don't let keep be the default for everything. That's how you ended up here.

Step 7: Assign Ownership

An audit with no owner is a report that gets ignored.

For every tool you're keeping, assign:

A named owner — one person responsible for the renewal decision
A renewal date in a tracked system — not a personal calendar

The goal is to make sure that when the next renewal comes up, someone is already aware of it and prepared to make a decision — not scrambling to figure out who owns it three days before the window closes.

What to Do After the Audit

The audit itself doesn't save money. Acting on it does.

Immediate actions (this week):

Cancel tools where the decision is obvious
Submit notice for any contract approaching its cancellation deadline
Right-size seats on plans where usage is significantly below licensed count

Short-term (this month):

Initiate renegotiation conversations on high-cost tools with leverage
Consolidate overlapping tools where a clear winner exists
Document the decisions made so next year's audit starts with a baseline

Ongoing:

Set a quarterly review cadence — 30 minutes to check for new tools, ownership changes, and upcoming renewals
Track every new tool from the moment it's approved, not retrospectively

How Often to Run a Spend Audit

First audit: as thorough as this guide — full payment source review, usage check, renewal calendar Quarterly: 30-minute review of anything new added since last time, upcoming renewals in the next 90 days, and any usage flags from the previous quarter At renewal: always review usage before renewing, regardless of the amount. A $99/month tool nobody uses costs $1,188 a year and takes five minutes to cancel.

The Honest Truth

The uncomfortable part of a spend audit isn't finding waste. It's that most of the waste was approved at some point by someone who had a good reason at the time.

Tools get added during busy periods, evaluated loosely, and never revisited. That's not a failure of judgement — it's what happens without a system.

The audit creates the system. The ongoing cadence keeps it running. For a deeper look at why auto-renewals happen and how to prevent them systematically, see our guide on how to avoid surprise SaaS auto-renewals.

*Want to make sure nothing slips through between audits?

Termedora tracks your SaaS contracts and sends automated renewal reminders at 90, 60, and 30 days — so every renewal gets reviewed before the window closes, every time.*