The average SaaS-using small team carries 5-12 active subscriptions nobody actively uses. Some are old vendor trials that auto-converted. Some are tools a former teammate signed up for and forgot. Some are duplicates of newer tools that replaced their function. Each one quietly bills the company card monthly.
This audit takes five minutes if the data is in one place and 25 minutes if it is scattered. Either way, the typical small team finds $200-$800 of monthly waste on the first pass.
Step 1: Pull the last 90 days of bank statements
Open the company card statements for the last three months. Filter by recurring charges. Most banks now offer this view natively (Mercury, Brex, Ramp, and Chase all do). Export to CSV if the filter view is hard to read.
Tag every recurring charge in three buckets: actively used, not sure, obsolete. The "not sure" pile is where most of the savings live.
Step 2: Check browser password manager and autofill
Open the team password manager (1Password, Bitwarden, Apple Keychain). Sort by date created. Every saved login that was created more than 6 months ago and has not been used in the last 90 days is a candidate for cancellation.
Most password managers show a "last used" timestamp inline. Tools that have not been opened in 90 days rarely come back into active use without a deliberate decision.
Step 3: Search the inbox for "receipt" and "invoice"
Search the company email account for the keywords receipt, invoice, and payment confirmation over the last 90 days. Cross-reference each sender against the bank-statement list. Any sender that appears in the email search but not in the active-use list is suspect.
This step also surfaces subscriptions billed to a personal credit card that should be on the company card, and vice versa.
Step 4: Cancel, pause, or downgrade
Most SaaS tools offer three actions, not just two. Many founders default to outright cancellation when a downgrade or pause would preserve the data while cutting the bill.
Cancel when the team will never use the tool again and the data export is clean.
Pause (or downgrade to the lowest tier) when there is any chance the tool comes back into use within 6 months. Many vendors offer a free tier that preserves account access without billing.
Negotiate when the tool is genuinely valuable but the price has crept up. Annual contract negotiation is covered in detail in a separate tutorial.
Step 5: Document the audit and put it on a recurring calendar
The audit is not a one-time exercise. New subscriptions appear monthly through trial conversions, teammate sign-ups, and vendor-initiated tier changes. The single highest-leverage habit is to put a 30-minute calendar event titled "SaaS audit" on the first business Monday of every quarter.
Tip: Most finance tools (Mercury, Brex, Ramp) now support per-vendor virtual cards. Issuing a separate card per SaaS tool makes future audits trivial because every charge is already pre-tagged by vendor.
Common traps the audit catches
The same patterns show up across hundreds of audits.
Auto-converted free trials
A free trial signed up 14 months ago that converted to a $79/month plan when no one cancelled. The tool has not been logged into in 11 months. Trial conversion is the single most common waste pattern.
Two tools that do the same thing
The team adopted Tool A. Six months later a teammate joined and recommended Tool B. Both tools are now active. One of them is doing 90% of the work; the other is paid for, half-configured, and largely unused.
Seat bloat after teammate departures
An ex-teammate's seat is still being billed because nobody removed it from the workspace. SaaS tools rarely send a "your team got smaller, here is a refund" email.
Annual price increases that snuck through
The vendor raised prices in the last renewal cycle and the new amount auto-charged. The renewal email landed in a generic finance inbox and nobody read it.
After the first audit
The first audit usually recovers the largest savings. Subsequent quarterly audits typically recover $50-$200 per quarter on a small team — not transformational, but enough to compound across the year and enough to keep the SaaS sprawl in check.