I ran a SaaS audit for a 14-person services company last month. They thought they were spending about $1,800/month on software. The real number was $4,600. The difference wasn't fraud or waste in any dramatic sense. It was just entropy — a trial that auto-converted in 2024, a departed employee still holding five seats, two tools doing the same job because one team liked each.
When you're under 10 people, software spend is visible. Everyone knows what everyone uses. Somewhere around 15 people, that breaks. A manager signs up for a $29/seat tool on a company card. HR picks a different e-sign vendor than sales uses. Someone trials a project tool, forgets about it, and the annual plan renews quietly every January. None of it is a crisis on its own. Added up, it's a junior salary.
The pattern I see in almost every audit: three categories dominate the waste. Duplicate tools (two CRMs, two chat apps, two file-share services). Ghost seats for people who left. And tier creep, where you were auto-upgraded to a plan with features you never asked for.
You don't need a procurement consultant. You need a spreadsheet and one focused afternoon. Pull every charge off the company cards and the bank account for the last 12 months and tag anything recurring. Then for each line, answer four questions:
That's it. No framework, no vendor rationalization deck. In every audit I've done for a shop this size, the first pass finds 20-40% savings with zero workflow impact. The savings aren't from negotiating. They're from cancelling things nobody noticed were still billing.
One card. One owner. That's the rule. Every SaaS subscription goes on a single company card that one person reconciles monthly. New tool requests go through that person. It's not bureaucracy — it's the smallest possible gate that stops the sprawl. For a 15-person company, this is a 30-minute-a-month job for your office manager or ops lead, not a full procurement function.
Also kill the annual prepay reflex. Yes, you save 15% going yearly. You also lose the ability to walk away in month three when the tool stops fitting. For anything you've used less than a year, pay monthly. Switch to annual only once the tool has earned it.
If your software bill feels bigger than it should and nobody owns it, that's the kind of cleanup we help growing shops run through without breaking what's working — send us a note.
— Alexander @ SBATC
