How-to4 min readBoris, Founder at VendurisPublished
How to Audit Your SaaS Spend
A spend audit is mostly a discovery exercise. The surprises are the tools nobody remembered buying.
I spent years on the vendor side of enterprise software, and the short answer is: pull every recurring software payment from your financial records, match each one to a contract and an owner, then compare what you're paying for against what's actually being used.
From payment records to a list you can act on
1Discover
Every recurring payment
- Accounts payable
- Corporate cards
- Expense reports
2Attach
Contract, dates, owner
- Signed agreement
- Renewal and notice
- Named internal owner
3Rank
Value and proximity
- Largest spend first
- Soonest renewal next
- Work the top, not the list
The surprises in a spend audit are almost always the tools nobody remembered buying.
Step by step
- Export recurring payments from accounts payable, corporate cards, and expense reports. No single source holds all of them, which is why tools go undiscovered.
- Build one list of vendors with the annual amount paid, deduplicating vendors that appear under different billing names.
- Match each vendor to a signed contract, and note where no contract can be found, those are the ones with unknown notice terms.
- Record renewal date, notice period, and internal owner for each vendor.
- Pull usage data where it's available and compare it against contracted quantities.
- Rank by annual value and by renewal proximity, then work the top of that list rather than the whole list.
How often to repeat it
Annually is the minimum, quarterly is better. Between full audits, the main thing to keep current is the renewal timeline, because a stale timeline is what turns a planned renewal into an automatic one.