Before You Start: Set Your Scope

A SaaS audit can cover a single department or the entire company. For a first audit, we recommend starting with company-wide financial data rather than department-by-department interviews. This gives you a complete picture of what is being paid before you start asking who owns what.

Define your time window. Twelve months of transaction data is the standard - long enough to capture annual renewals, short enough to stay practical. Set a clear output goal before you begin: are you trying to cut costs, establish a master inventory, or both? The answer shapes how detailed you need to get.

Benchmark: Finance teams that complete a structured SaaS audit for the first time typically find 20-35% of their subscriptions are either unused, duplicated, or owned by someone who has left the company. The average first-audit savings is $1,200 per employee.

The Complete Subscription Audit Checklist

Phase 1: Data Gathering

  1. Pull all company card and bank transactions for the past 12 months. Filter for recurring charges. Look for the same vendor name appearing monthly or annually.
  2. Export your expense management system data (Expensify, Ramp, Brex, Concur). Flag any line items categorized as "software," "subscriptions," or "SaaS."
  3. Request invoices from IT and procurement for any software purchases that went through purchase orders rather than credit cards.
  4. Check company email inboxes for receipt domains. Search for emails from @billing.*, @invoice.*, or @receipts.* - SaaS vendors almost always send payment confirmations.
  5. Ask department heads to self-report any tools their teams are using. Give them 48 hours and a simple form: tool name, cost, billing cadence, primary user.

Phase 2: Categorization

  1. Create a master spreadsheet with columns for: vendor name, category, monthly cost, annual cost, billing cadence, renewal date, number of seats, primary owner, and status.
  2. Group tools by category: communication, project management, sales, marketing, finance, HR, security, developer tools, AI tools, other. This immediately reveals where you have duplicates.
  3. Flag every category where you have more than one tool. Multiple project management tools, multiple video conferencing subscriptions, and multiple CRMs are the most common areas of overlap.
  4. Calculate total spend by category. This single view often surprises finance leaders who had no idea, for example, that their company is spending $8,000/month on developer tools spread across 15 different subscriptions.

Phase 3: Usage Verification

  1. For your top 20 tools by spend, pull last-login data from each tool's admin console. Document the number of licensed seats versus the number of users who logged in within the past 30 days.
  2. Cross-reference against your current employee list. Every account belonging to a former employee is waste that can be cancelled immediately.
  3. For tools without an admin console (small SaaS tools, legacy software), contact the vendor directly and request a usage report. Most will provide this to avoid a cancellation.
  4. Rate each tool's usage level: High (used weekly by most licensed users), Medium (used occasionally or by fewer than 50% of licensed users), Low (rarely used or unused entirely). This triage shapes your action priority.

Tip: Do not rely on self-reported usage. People systematically overestimate how often they use tools they have advocated for. Pull the objective login data even if stakeholders push back.

Phase 4: Redundancy Check

  1. For each category with multiple tools, document the primary use case of each. Sometimes tools that appear redundant actually serve different functions - but often they genuinely overlap.
  2. Interview the owners of overlapping tools. The goal is not to eliminate every duplicate instantly, but to understand whether consolidation is feasible. Ask: "If we cancelled Tool B, could your team live with just Tool A?"
  3. Create a redundancy decision matrix: list each duplicate pair, note the cost of each, and mark whether consolidation is recommended, possible with migration effort, or not feasible.

Phase 5: Owner Assignment

  1. Every active subscription must have a named owner - a person whose name is in the "owner" column and who is responsible for the renewal decision. "The marketing team" is not an owner. "Sarah Chen, VP Marketing" is an owner.
  2. Assign owners based on who uses the tool most, not who originally purchased it. The original buyer may have left the company.
  3. Notify each owner of their assigned tools and ask them to confirm whether each is still needed. This step surfaces a surprising number of tools that owners themselves want to cancel.

Phase 6: Renewal Calendar

  1. For every subscription, record the next renewal date. If you cannot find the renewal date in your records, check the original purchase email or contact the vendor.
  2. Create calendar reminders 90 days before each renewal. Ninety days is the minimum lead time needed to: evaluate usage, negotiate terms if keeping, or provide cancellation notice within the contract window.
  3. Flag renewals happening in the next 90 days for immediate action. These are time-sensitive - you may only have days or weeks to decide.

Phase 7: Decision Matrix

  1. For each subscription, assign one of four outcomes: Keep as-is, Right-size (reduce seats), Negotiate (keep but at lower cost), or Cancel.
  2. Prioritize cancellations and right-sizing by annual savings. Focus your energy where the dollar impact is highest first.
  3. Calculate projected annual savings from all planned actions. This number becomes your business case for investing in ongoing SaaS management - and it almost always justifies the audit effort many times over.

If you want to skip the manual spreadsheet work entirely, SubScrub automates most of this checklist - pulling transaction data, categorizing tools, surfacing unused seats, and tracking renewals without requiring a manual audit every quarter.

After the Audit: Keeping It Current

A completed audit is a snapshot. Within 60 days, new tools will have been purchased and employees will have left. The value of an audit compounds only if you establish ongoing processes to keep it current.

The minimum viable ongoing process is: a shared software request form (so new purchases are visible), an offboarding checklist that includes software deprovisioning, and a quarterly 30-minute review of the top 10 subscriptions by spend. This is manageable for any finance team and prevents the audit findings from going stale.

Common mistake: Finance teams complete an audit, save $30,000, declare victory, and then let the stack drift back into chaos over the next 18 months. The ongoing process is as important as the one-time audit.