Cledara, 2025 Software Spend Report
A SaaS audit finds every software subscription your company pays for, then cuts what you don't need. Run one and you will typically find tools nobody uses, duplicate subscriptions, and licenses for people who left years ago. Most of the waste doesn't come from a single bad decision — it builds up quietly over time, driven by four overlapping problems that most teams never address systematically.
Shadow IT — subscriptions bought by individual teams outside procurement. Finance never sees them until the card statement arrives.
Duplicate tools — two teams solving the same problem with different software. Both tools get renewed because neither team knows about the other.
Unused licenses — people leave, licenses stay. A team of 12 paying for 20 seats because nobody updated the count when three people left last year. According to Zylo's 2024 SaaS Management Index, companies use only 49% of their provisioned SaaS licenses on average.
Auto-renewed tools nobody uses — the compounding problem. Without a system, every year the waste grows. An audit resets the clock. BetterCloud's 2025 State of SaaS found that 40% of organizations still track renewals with spreadsheets and calendars — which is why audits keep surfacing tools nobody knew they were paying for.
Before you start reviewing tools, you need to know what you're looking at. Gather these sources before you sit down. If 40% of organizations are still tracking renewals manually (BetterCloud, 2025 State of SaaS), it's no surprise that subscriptions fall through the cracks without a complete picture.
Work through each phase in order. Print it, open it on a second screen, or download the spreadsheet version below.
A formula-driven Excel and Google Sheets spreadsheet — tracks expiry dates, calculates notice deadlines automatically, and colour-codes what needs attention.
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A SaaS audit is a structured review of every software subscription your company pays for. You find all the tools, check which ones are actually used, and cancel or downgrade the ones that aren't. Most teams run one and find they're paying for 20–40% more software than they thought.
Once a quarter is the right cadence for most small teams. The first audit takes the longest — usually 2–3 hours. After that, a quarterly review keeps the list clean and catches anything that slipped through procurement.
Start with three months of credit card and bank statements. Then search company email inboxes for 'invoice', 'receipt', and 'billing'. Check your SSO dashboard for connected apps, and ask every team lead what tools their team uses. Each source will surface tools the others missed.
At minimum: discovery (finding all subscriptions), inventory (recording cost, owner, and renewal date for each), review (flagging unused or duplicate tools), action (cancelling or downgrading flagged tools), and ongoing (setting renewal alerts and assigning owners).
Set reminders at 60, 30, and 7 days before each renewal date. Calendar reminders work if you stay on top of them. A dedicated tool like Renewl automates this — upload the contract PDF, AI extracts the dates, and alerts fire automatically.