To audit your business software subscriptions, list every recurring charge from three places — your bank and card statements, your App Store and Google Play accounts, and the people who work for you — then mark each one with the last date somebody actually opened it. Anything nobody has opened this month is a candidate to cancel, downgrade or replace. Most small businesses find at least one tool they forgot they were buying.
This is a boring job and it is worth doing once a quarter. Here is how to run it without turning it into a week of work.
What is a software subscription audit?
It is a single list: what you pay for, how often, who uses it, and what would break if it stopped. Nothing more clever than that.
The reason it works is that software spend does not arrive as a decision. It arrives as a trial somebody started, a seat added for a contractor who left, an annual renewal that fires quietly in the middle of a busy month. No single charge is big enough to argue about. Together they are a line item.
An audit is the moment you look at all of them at once, which is the only view in which they look expensive.
Where do business software subscriptions actually hide?
In our experience the same four hiding places come up every time.
On a personal card
Somebody needed a tool at 11pm, put it on their own card, and claimed it back once. The claim stopped. The subscription did not.
Inside an app store
Subscriptions bought inside an iPhone or Android app do not appear in your software vendor emails at all. They are billed by Apple or Google, and they are invisible unless you go and look. Apple documents where to find them in its guide to viewing and cancelling subscriptions, and Google does the same for Play Store subscriptions.
Bundled into something else
A plan you bought for one feature now includes four products, one of which duplicates a tool you also pay for separately.
In annual billing
Monthly charges get noticed because they repeat. An annual renewal appears once, twelve months after anyone last thought about it, and is the single most common thing a first audit turns up.
How do you find what you are paying for?
Three passes. Give yourself an hour.
Pass one: the statement
Open the last twelve months of business bank and card statements and mark every charge from a name you do not immediately recognise. Twelve months, not three — that is what catches the annual renewals. Write each one down with the amount and the date it recurs.
Pass two: the app stores and the personal cards
Check the Apple and Google accounts of every phone the business pays for, and ask anyone who buys tools whether anything is still on a personal card. This pass is the one people skip and it is usually where the surprises are.
Pass three: the people
Send the list round and ask one question against each line: when did you last open this? Not “do we need it” — that invites a defence of the tool. “When did you last open it” invites a date, and a date is a fact you can act on.
Which subscriptions should you cancel?
Sort the finished list into four piles.
Nobody opened it. Cancel. If it turns out to matter, you will find out within a month and can buy it again — usually on a better introductory price than the one you were on.
Two tools do one job. Pick the one people actually use, not the one that is better on paper. Migration cost is real, so this is worth doing deliberately rather than immediately.
The seat count is wrong. Count the humans, not the licences. Contractors, leavers and “we might grow into it” seats are the commonest overspend and the easiest to fix, because it is one email to the vendor.
It earns its keep. Leave it alone and put the renewal date in a calendar so the next audit is shorter.
What we learned building Receiply
We hit this problem from the other side while building Receiply, our receipt-scanning app. One of the charts it draws from your own receipts is called subscriptions detected — the same merchant, the same amount, month after month. It is a pattern, not a bank feed: the app has no connection to any bank and never asks for one, so it only sees what has been scanned or entered.
That limitation turned out to be the useful part. When people first looked at that chart, the reaction was rarely “I did not know the price went up”. It was “I did not know that was still running”. The recurring charge had stopped being a decision and become part of the background.
A business audit is the same discovery at a larger scale. You are not looking for a tool that is bad value. You are looking for the one that stopped being a decision.
When does automation beat another subscription?
Sometimes the answer to a gap is not a fifth tool. It is fifteen lines of automation joining two you already own.
The test we use with clients is whether the work is yours or generic. Generic work — email, accounting, storage, calendars — should be bought, because somebody else maintains it for less than you can. Work that is specific to how your business actually runs is where off-the-shelf software stops fitting, and where you end up paying for a tool and then paying somebody to work around it. We wrote about that trade-off in more detail in custom software vs off-the-shelf, and about the tasks worth automating first in 7 admin tasks you can automate today.
If your audit turns up three tools that half-solve one problem, that is usually the signal. Workflow automation is often cheaper than the third subscription, and it does not renew without asking.
Do this next
Block one hour. Pull twelve months of statements. Write the list. Ask everyone when they last opened each tool. Cancel what comes back blank, and diary the renewal dates you are keeping.
Then put the next audit in the calendar for three months’ time, when it will take twenty minutes instead of an hour.
If the audit leaves you with a gap that no tool fits properly, talk to us about it — that is the work we do.
FAQ
How often should you audit business software subscriptions?
Quarterly is enough for most small businesses. The first one takes about an hour; later ones are much faster because you only look at what changed and at renewals coming up.
What is the fastest way to find forgotten subscriptions?
Twelve months of card statements, read in one sitting. Three months will miss every annual renewal, which is where the forgotten ones usually live.
Should I cancel a subscription nobody has opened this month?
Usually yes, unless it is insurance-like — backups, security, compliance — where “nobody opened it” is exactly what you are paying for. For everything else, a month of silence is a fair test.
Is it cheaper to build software than to keep subscribing?
Not for generic work like email or accounting. It can be for work specific to your business, particularly where several subscriptions each solve part of the problem and someone spends hours a week joining them by hand.
Can an app tell me what I am subscribed to?
Only from data it can see. Receiply, for example, spots repeating charges in the receipts and transactions you have entered, because it has no bank connection. An app store account shows subscriptions billed through it. Neither is a complete picture on its own, which is why the statement pass matters.