Your software spending is out of control.
Not because you’re bad at your job—because this is what happens when anyone in the company can pull out a credit card and sign up for a new tool. Sales gets Gong. Marketing grabs HubSpot and six other things. Engineering spins up three monitoring tools because the first two “weren’t quite right.”
Meanwhile, you’re supposed to track it all in a spreadsheet that’s outdated before you even save it.
The average small-to-medium sized business (SMB) now uses over 56 software applications. Finance typically knows about a fraction of them. The rest? Buried in expense reports, charged to corporate cards, renewing automatically every month while nobody notices.
Here’s how to get control of your SaaS management without needing an IT department or enterprise software that costs more than the problem you’re trying to solve.
1. Find everything (yes, everything)
Most finance teams already have a spreadsheet tracking their major software vendors. That’s where everyone starts.
The problem is what’s missing from that spreadsheet.
Pull your last three months of credit card statements and accounts payable reports. Ask every department head to write down what software their team actually uses day-to-day—not just what they’re supposed to use. Compare all of that to your existing list.
The gap between what you thought you had and what you actually have? That’s where the money’s going—and it’s usually bigger than you expect.
If you use QuickBooks or similar accounting software, export your vendor list and look for software companies you don’t recognize. Every one of those is a subscription someone signed up for.
This manual discovery catches the obvious stuff. The problem is it misses shadow IT—the tools people sign up for and expense, the free trials that converted to paid, the subscriptions hiding in department budgets. For complete visibility, you’d need to check login data from Google Workspace or Microsoft 365, but most finance teams don’t have access or the know-how to use those systems.
That’s the gap tools like Sheaf fill—connecting to your email system, accounting software, or processing your GL to automatically surface everything, including what you didn’t know to look for.
2. Put someone’s name next to every line
Every piece of software needs an owner. Not a department—an actual person’s name.
That person is now in charge of deciding if new people should get access, checking if anyone’s actually using it, and making the call at renewal time about whether you keep paying for it.
This one rule stops most duplicate buying. When someone asks to purchase new project management software, you can say, “Did you talk to Sarah? She owns the three project management tools we already pay for.”
If nobody wants to own it, that tells you something. Maybe it’s not actually important. Maybe it should be canceled.
3. Figure out who’s actually using what you’re paying for
Here’s where it gets tricky.
Roughly half of software licenses sit unused or underutilized at most companies. That’s real money—often thousands of dollars annually—but finding those unused seats isn’t straightforward.
Software vendors don’t make this easy. Some will send you usage reports if you ask. Others make you submit support tickets or log into admin panels you don’t have access to. And even when you get the data, it’s inconsistent. One tool shows “last login dates.” Another shows “monthly active users.” A third just counts “assigned licenses” without clarifying if anyone actually uses them.
Worse, many vendors gamify engagement—they count any login, any click, any automated notification as “activity.” So their usage report shows 80% adoption when half your team hasn’t meaningfully used the tool in months. You’re not always getting apples-to-apples information.
Here’s what you can actually do:
Focus on your biggest renewals. If you’re spending $10K+ annually on something, chase down usage numbers before you renew. For your top 5-10 applications by spend, try to get usage checks into your quarterly routine.
For everything else? Be realistic. Manually tracking usage across 30-40 applications means dealing with 30-40 different vendors and reporting systems every quarter. That’s days of work you probably don’t have.
This is where spreadsheets hit their limit. You can track renewals manually, but systematically monitoring usage across dozens of tools requires either a dedicated person or software that pulls comparable data automatically.
Focus your energy on the big money. That’s where the quick wins live.
4. Build a renewal calendar with padded lead time
Automatic renewal is great for software vendors and terrible for your budget.
Most software contracts require 30-60 days’ notice if you want to cancel or renegotiate. By the time you see the charge on your credit card, it’s too late—you’re locked in for another year at whatever price increase they decided to add.
Here’s the system that works: Set calendar reminders at 90 days, 60 days, and 30 days before each renewal date.
90 days out: Review usage and make a decision—keep it as-is, negotiate for better terms, downgrade to fewer licenses, or replace it with something else.
60 days out: Contact the vendor if you’re negotiating. This gives you time to actually have a conversation instead of accepting their standard renewal terms.
30 days out: Execute whatever you decided. Send the cancellation notice, confirm the new terms, or approve the renewal.
This three-point system gives you options instead of forcing you to react. Most finance teams only realize a renewal is coming when the invoice arrives. By then, you’re just accepting whatever the vendor proposes.
Build the calendar once, update it quarterly, and you’ll never get caught flat-footed again.
5. Build in a repeating SaaS audit
You can clean everything up today and watch it become a mess again in six months if you don’t make this a regular thing.
Put a recurring meeting on your calendar every three months:
- Update the list of software
- Check that the right people are still listed as owners
- Compare licenses paid for against actual usage
- Look ahead at what’s renewing soon
Doing it manually works fine when you’re tracking 10-15 pieces of software. Once you get past that, keeping everything updated starts taking more time than it’s worth. That’s when it makes sense to look at tools designed specifically for this—they automatically find your software, track who’s using what, remind you about renewals, and give you at-a-glance understanding of your company’s SaaS health.
Just start
You don’t need perfect information or complicated dashboards to save money. You need to know what you’re paying for, who’s responsible for it, whether people are using it, and when you need to make decisions about it.
For most small finance teams, these five steps can save thousands of dollars in the first three months and much more over a year. Not because the steps are complicated—because most companies just aren’t tracking this consistently (or efficiently).
Update your spreadsheet with what you’re actually paying for. Write down who owns what. Check if people are using it. Set up those calendar reminders. Make renewal decisions before they happen automatically.
When keeping track of everything becomes a headache and drains 10+ hours from your team every month, that’s when tools like Sheaf make sense. They connect to your accounting software, find all your subscriptions automatically, track usage for you, and warn you about upcoming renewals.
The mess won’t fix itself. But it will stay clean if you build the routine.