You're probably overspending on software by 20-30%

The average 200-person company spends $2.4 million a year on SaaS. Marketing tools, CRM, project management, cloud hosting, design tools, communication platforms. The list gets long fast.

Most CFOs know the rough total. Pull it from AP, look at the recurring charges, add it up. The number is usually bigger than expected, but at least it's a number.

The part nobody tracks is the waste inside that number.

Gartner estimates that companies waste 25% of their SaaS spend on unused licenses, duplicate tools, and contracts that renewed without review. For a company spending $2.4 million, that's $600,000 a year going to software that nobody uses, that overlaps with other tools, or that costs more than it should because nobody negotiated at renewal.

That's not a rounding error. That's headcount.

What a SaaS spend audit actually looks like

You don't need a procurement team or a six-month project. You need one afternoon and access to your AP data.

Here's the process.

Step 1: Pull 12 months of AP data

Export every recurring payment from the last 12 months. Filter for:

Monthly or annual charges over $500
Payments to software vendors (ignore utilities, rent, and insurance for now)
Any charge categorized as "software," "subscription," or "technology"

Most accounting systems can export this in 10 minutes. If you use QuickBooks, Xero, or NetSuite, filter by vendor type or GL code.

You're looking for a flat list: vendor name, monthly cost, annual cost, payment frequency. Nothing more.

Step 2: Count your tools

This step surprises people. The typical 200-person company runs 80 to 120 SaaS tools. Most finance teams estimate 30 to 40.

The gap comes from department-level purchases. Marketing bought a social scheduling tool. Engineering signed up for a monitoring service. Sales added a prospecting tool to their Amex. None of these went through procurement because most companies this size don't have a procurement process for software.

Go through the AP list and count the distinct vendors. Write down the number. If it's higher than you expected, you're not alone.

Step 3: Find the duplicates

This is where the money starts showing up.

Look for overlapping categories. Common ones:

Project management. Monday, Asana, Trello, Jira, Notion, Basecamp, ClickUp. Companies with 100+ employees often have three of these running at the same time. Different departments picked different tools. Nobody consolidated.

Design. Figma, Canva, Adobe Creative Cloud, Sketch. The design team uses Figma. Marketing uses Canva. Someone in product still has an Adobe license from 2023.

Communication. Slack, Microsoft Teams, Google Chat, Zoom, Webex. If you're paying for both Slack and Teams, one of them is a ghost town.

Data and analytics. Tableau, Looker, Power BI, Amplitude, Mixpanel. Some companies pay for three BI tools because each team picked their own.

Highlight every category where you're paying for two or more tools that do the same job. Add up the annual cost of the duplicates.

A 150-person fintech we worked with found $47,000 per year in duplicate project management and design tools. Three teams were paying for three different tools. They consolidated to one and saved the full $47,000.

Step 4: Find the zombies

Zombie subscriptions are tools nobody uses but that keep charging because nobody cancelled them.

Check for:

Tools that were replaced. You moved from Trello to Asana in September. Is the Trello bill still running?
Tools tied to departed employees. The VP of Marketing left in January. Her HubSpot seat, her Canva Pro license, and her Loom subscription are still active.
Tools from abandoned projects. Someone signed up for a data pipeline tool during a Q3 experiment. The experiment ended. The subscription didn't.

If you can't check login data easily, start with a simpler question: ask each department head to name every software tool their team uses. Compare that list against the AP data. The tools that appear on the AP report but not on anyone's list are your zombies.

Average zombie cost for a 200-person company: $18,000 to $35,000 per year.

Step 5: Check seat utilization

You're paying for 50 Salesforce seats. How many people logged in last month?

Most SaaS tools charge per seat. Companies routinely pay for 40% to 60% more seats than they use. People leave the company. People switch roles. People stop using the tool. The seat count never goes down because nobody checks.

For your top 5 vendors by cost, log into each admin panel and pull the active user count. Compare it against what you're paying for.

If you're paying for 50 seats and 28 people logged in last month, you're overpaying by 44%. On a $120,000 annual Salesforce contract, that's $52,800 in unused seats.

Step 6: Flag contracts renewing in the next 180 days

This is where the audit turns into action.

For every vendor on your list, find the renewal date. Some are on the invoice. Some are in the contract. Some require logging into the vendor portal.

Flag everything renewing in the next 180 days. These are the contracts you can still negotiate, downgrade, or cancel.

For everything renewing in the next 90 days, check the notice period. Some contracts require 30, 60, or even 90 days of advance notice to cancel or make changes. If the notice window is already open, you need to act this week.

What you'll find

Based on the audits we've seen:

Duplicate tools: 3 to 5 categories with overlapping software. Annual cost: $20,000 to $60,000.
Zombie subscriptions: 2 to 6 tools nobody uses. Annual cost: $8,000 to $35,000.
Seat waste: 30% to 50% unused seats across top vendors. Annual cost: $15,000 to $80,000.
Unreviewed renewals: 4 to 8 contracts renewing in the next 180 days with no owner assigned.

Total recoverable spend for a 200-person company: $80,000 to $175,000 per year.

The contract problem underneath

The audit tells you where the money is going. But the contracts tell you whether you can do anything about it.

A zombie subscription is easy to cancel if it's month-to-month. It's a different story when it's locked into a 36-month term with no termination clause.

Duplicate tools are easy to consolidate if the contract lets you downgrade seats mid-term. Not all of them do.

Seat waste is easy to fix if the vendor prorates for removed seats. Some contracts only adjust at renewal.

Every line item on your audit comes back to the contract terms. That's why the last step of any SaaS spend audit is reading the contracts that matter most.

Skip the manual contract review

You can open each PDF and search for the renewal clause, the notice period, and the price escalation terms. For 10 contracts, that takes about 2 hours. For 40 contracts, that takes a week nobody has.

ClauseWarn reads the contracts for you. Upload a PDF, and the AI extracts the renewal date, notice period, auto-renewal clause, termination terms, and price escalation details in under 60 seconds. It flags the contracts that need attention and sends alerts before any deadline closes.

The SaaS spend audit tells you where the waste is. ClauseWarn tells you what the contracts actually say about whether you can fix it.

Start with 3 contracts free at clausewarn.com.

How to Run a SaaS Spend Audit in One Afternoon