Subscriptions do not arrive as a decision. They arrive one at a time, each one small enough not to warrant a conversation, and they leave the same way they came in, which is to say they do not.
An hour once a year recovers more money than most cost-cutting exercises, and it is genuinely the least painful hour available.
Find what you are actually paying for
Do not work from memory, and do not work from a list someone maintains. Both are wrong, in the same direction.
Go to the bank and card statements for the last twelve months and pull out every recurring payment. Twelve months matters, because annual renewals are exactly the ones that get forgotten and they are usually the largest.
Check personal cards used for business too. Tools bought in a hurry on somebody’s own card, then expensed and never revisited, are extremely common and completely invisible to the accounts system.
The four things you will find
- Something nobody uses. Bought for a project that ended. The clearest possible saving.
- Two things doing one job. Two project tools, two file shares, two chat apps, because different teams chose differently and nobody consolidated.
- Seats for people who left. Per-user pricing keeps charging for accounts nobody disabled. This is also a security matter, not just a cost one.
- A tier above what you use. Upgraded for one feature during one busy period, never reviewed.
The third is the one worth acting on immediately, regardless of the money. A former employee with a live account is a genuine exposure.
The overlap most businesses miss
Before renewing anything, check whether you already own it.
Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace both include a great deal that businesses routinely buy separately: file storage, video calls, forms, basic project tracking, shared notes, simple internal sites, and depending on tier, automation and app building.
Paying for a separate form tool, a separate storage service and a separate meeting product on top of a licence that includes all three is one of the most common situations there is. The included versions are sometimes weaker, and sometimes they are simply less familiar, which is a different problem with a much cheaper solution.
This is also where a lot of confusion about what needs a paid licence starts, because the boundary between included and extra is genuinely unclear until someone maps it.
The question for each line
Not “is this useful”. Almost everything is useful.
If this stopped working tomorrow, who would notice by the end of the week?
A named person is a keep. “Someone probably” is a cancel. It is a harsher test than the usual one and it is the only one that reliably separates habit from need.
Cancelling without breaking something
Two cautions, both learned expensively.
Get your data out first. Access usually ends immediately and the data may not be retrievable afterwards. Export before cancelling, and open the export to confirm it contains what you expected.
Check what depends on it. Tools get wired into other tools. Cancelling a service that quietly authenticates something else, or receives a form submission, breaks a chain nobody documented. This is a particularly good moment to find out what is running under which account.
Downgrade before cancelling where possible. It keeps the data reachable while you confirm nothing broke.
Making it stick
The audit is easy. Not needing it again in eighteen months is the harder part.
One person approves new subscriptions. One shared list of what exists, who owns it, and when it renews. Removing access becomes part of someone leaving, alongside the laptop and the keys.
That is a fifteen-minute change to how the business runs, and it prevents the entire problem recurring.
The honest summary
Twelve months of statements, one question per line, and check what your existing licences already include before renewing anything.
Most businesses recover a meaningful monthly sum and, more usefully, find at least one account belonging to someone who left.
If you get through it and cannot tell whether something is genuinely needed or whether you already pay for it twice, describe what is on the list. Overlap is usually obvious from the outside.
The other things nobody is minding
Unused software is one of a family. These are the others: the ones that cost nothing to check and quite a lot to discover late, starting with the one that catches businesses out most often.
Common questions
Where do we start with a software audit?
Twelve months of bank and card statements, not memory and not a list someone maintains. Twelve months matters because annual renewals are the ones that get forgotten and they are usually the largest.
What is the test for keeping something?
Not “is it useful”, because almost everything is. Ask who would notice by the end of the week if it stopped working. A named person is a keep; “someone probably” is a cancel.
What should we check before cancelling?
Get your data out first and open the export to confirm it contains what you expected, then check what else depends on the tool. Downgrading before cancelling keeps the data reachable while you confirm nothing broke.