Every quarter I sit down with our books and hunt for overhead that's outlived its usefulness. Last April the hunt turned up $2,400 a month in charges we were still paying for tools, services, and standing orders nobody had touched in months. That's $28,800 a year. For a 15-person company, that's a raise, a bonus pool, or a very good hire.
Overhead creep is boring, which is why it wins. It's the $79/month project management tool we replaced but never canceled. It's the $340/month coffee service that keeps delivering to a break room where six of the eight employees now work remote three days a week. It's the parking spot we rent for a delivery van we sold in 2024. Individually, each line looks small enough to ignore. Together they eat a real percentage of your operating margin.
In my experience, a growing company adds roughly one new recurring vendor per employee per year. At 15 people that's a lot of automatic charges nobody owns. The person who signed up left. The card on file still works. The invoice goes to accounts payable, gets coded to "software" or "office expense," and disappears into the P&L.
I pull three months of credit card statements and the AP aging report. Then I go line by line and ask one question: do I know exactly who uses this and why? If the answer is no, or if I have to guess, it goes on a shortlist. I email the department head one sentence: "Are we still using [vendor]? Yes/no by Friday." No answer by Friday, I cancel it. If it turns out we needed it, we can resubscribe. Nothing we've canceled this way has ever been resubscribed. Not once in three years.
I also flag anything where the price went up more than 10% year-over-year without a corresponding conversation. Software vendors bank on you not noticing. Insurance brokers do the same thing at renewal. The renewal quote is a starting number, not a final one, and "we're reviewing options" is a complete sentence that saves us roughly 4-8% every renewal cycle.
Big cost-cutting projects hurt morale and usually cut somehting that mattered. Quarterly overhead audits cut only what's already dead. Nobody misses a subscription they weren't using. Nobody's job changes. The company just keeps more of what it earned, which is the entire point of running a business well.
The other benefit is that it forces me to actually read our P&L every quarter instead of glancing at the totals. I catch coding mistakes, duplicate charges, and vendors we're paying twice under slightly different names. Three hours, four times a year. Best return on time I get.
If your overhead line has been quietly climbing and you're not sure where it went, this is exactly the kind of cleanup we help small operators run. Send us a note and we'll walk through it with you.
— Amanda @ SBATC
