To audit your software subscriptions in an afternoon, pull twelve months of card and bank statements, list every recurring software charge, and record for each one who owns it, what it is used for, what it scales with and when it renews. Then look for overlap and decide, tool by tool, whether to keep, downgrade, combine or cancel.
First, collect the charges
Work from statements, not from memory. Go through every company card, the main bank account, and any personal card the owner or office manager has used for the business. Twelve months matters because annual renewals appear only once.
Check app store receipts on company phones and tablets too. Subscriptions bought inside a mobile app are billed through the phone's store and show up under the store's name, not the tool's.
A contracting business collects tools from several directions: scheduling and dispatch, estimating, invoicing, accounting, payroll, vehicle tracking, a phone system, review requests, email marketing, photo storage, forms and checklists. You may find a trial nobody cancelled, or something a technician bought to solve one problem on one job.
Then fill in one row per tool
- The name of the tool and what appears on the statement, which are not always the same.
- The amount, and whether it is monthly or annual.
- The owner: one named person who decides whether it stays.
- Who holds the login and which email address it is registered to.
- What it is used for, in a sentence, written by someone who uses it.
- What the price scales with: seats, technicians, jobs, vehicles, contacts, messages, or nothing.
- The renewal date and notice period, from the contract or the account's billing page.
- When somebody last logged in, if the tool will tell you.
The scaling column is the one to take care over. A flat charge costs the same next year. A charge per technician or per vehicle grows every time you add a crew. Total the list for a year, then again at the headcount you expect next year. Our software bill calculator is a free calculator that does this for a single per-seat or per-unit bill, with the three-year total alongside.
Look for overlap
Sort the list by what each tool is used for and duplicates stand out. Shapes to look for: two tools that both send invoices, a field service package with built-in forms alongside a separate forms app, a texting service when the scheduling software already sends appointment reminders, file storage bought three times by three people.
Overlap is not always waste. Sometimes the standalone tool is better at the job and the crew prefers it. The point is to choose deliberately and stop paying for the one you did not choose.
What to do with the list
- Cancel anything with no owner and no recent login, after exporting any data in it.
- Remove seats for people who have left. Check whether the bill drops now or at renewal.
- Downgrade tiers where the features that justified the higher tier are not used.
- Put every renewal date and notice deadline in a shared calendar.
- Move accounts registered to personal or ex-employee emails onto a company address.
- Mark the two or three largest lines for a closer look before their next renewal.
- Agree who approves new subscriptions from now on, and repeat the audit yearly.
For the largest lines, especially any that grow with headcount, ask how much of the product you use. If the answer is a small part, there are options beyond a cheaper plan. Our guide to renting versus owning business software goes through them, including when staying put is the sensible choice.
Our page on software for home service contractors shows what can be rebuilt. At Hiro that conversation starts with this kind of list, since we quote after seeing the bill.