How to audit your software spend in one hour

By Marcus Webb · Method guide, October 23, 2026 · Not a review

Most software audits turn into a project and therefore never happen. This one is designed to finish in an hour, produce three decisions, and require no tools beyond a spreadsheet and access to your card statement. The goal is not a complete inventory — it is finding the two or three lines that should not exist.

Minutes 0–15: build the list from the card, not from memory

Open the last three months of card and bank statements and search for recurring charges. Do not work from memory — memory produces the tools you like and omits the ones you tolerated. Export to a spreadsheet with four columns:

Tool
Annual cost (monthly × 12 — convert everything to a year, because annual figures make small numbers look like what they are)
Last login (you will have to check; it is the column that does the work)
Holds data we could not recreate? (yes/no)

Minutes 15–35: fill the last-login column

This is the only part that takes effort and the only part that matters. Log in to each tool and find the last activity — most products show it in an admin or team view. If you cannot find it, that is itself an answer.

Three patterns will appear:

Used daily. Leave it alone. Do not optimise your best tools first; that is procrastination with a spreadsheet.
Used monthly. Legitimate. Check only whether the tier is right — this is where over-provisioning hides.
Last login was yours, during the last audit. This is the target. Expect two to four of these, and expect the total to be more than you guessed.

Minutes 35–50: look for the duplicate

You will almost certainly find two tools doing the same job. Common pairs:

A task tool and a document tool that both hold project trackers.
Two email platforms — one for the newsletter, one left over from a launch.
A CRM and a spreadsheet that both hold "the real list."

The duplicate is more expensive than the unused tool, because it costs money twice: once in subscription, and once in the weekly decision about where things go. Consolidation is usually the highest-return action in an audit — and the hardest, because two people each prefer a different one.

One honest counter-example: consolidation is not always right. A flat-priced all-in-one at $17/month can replace four subscriptions, but if it is weaker at the one job you do daily, you have traded money for friction. We covered that trade in the hidden costs of cheap software.

Minutes 50–60: three decisions, written down

Cancel one thing. Choose the tool with an old last-login and no load-bearing data. Do it now, not after the audit.
Downgrade one thing. Look for a tier whose extras you cannot name a weekly use for. Per-seat plans are where this hides: contractors and finance staff on full seats, seats for people who left.
Switch one thing to monthly if you are uncertain about it. A monthly premium of 14–25% for three months is cheaper than a year of an annual commitment you regret.

What the numbers usually look like

For a five-person business, a typical audit finds 10–14 subscriptions totalling $300–$600 a month, of which $60–$150 is not earning anything. That is $700–$1,800 a year — not transformative, and worth an hour, and more importantly it removes the ambiguity that makes every future tool decision slower.

The bigger finding is usually structural rather than financial: you are paying for two overlapping tools and the team has quietly chosen one. That is worth more to know than any individual cancellation.

What to do with the answer

Put the annual total somewhere visible. Software spend grows by accretion, one $12 subscription at a time, and nobody ever sees the sum.
Add a renewal column with dates. The single most effective change: you stop being surprised, and you stop cancelling whatever happens to renew in the month you looked.
Repeat quarterly, not annually. Fifteen minutes each quarter beats an hour once a year, because the decisions are smaller and you remember why each tool was bought.

What this guide is, and is not

This is a method, and the dollar ranges above are illustrative of what audits typically surface, not a measured sample — we have flagged them as such rather than presenting them as data. Prices referenced elsewhere on this site were verified from vendor pages on October 23, 2026. Our hands-on testing cycle is in progress; see How We Test for what that will and will not cover.