How to audit your recurring business spend in an afternoon
A practical checklist for building the real list of what your company pays for every month, and cutting the obvious waste the same day.
You do not need a project for this. You need three uninterrupted hours, access to the billing inbox, and a willingness to cancel things. Work through it in order.
Step 1: gather the charges, 45 minutes
Search your billing inbox for receipt, invoice, payment received, subscription renewal, auto renew and your card's last four digits. Cover the last twelve months so annual invoices show up. For each hit, record the vendor, the amount exactly as printed, the currency, the period covered, the seat count and the charge date.
Step 2: normalise to a monthly figure, 20 minutes
- Yearly invoice: divide by twelve
- Quarterly: divide by three
- Weekly: multiply by 52 and divide by 12
- One off charges: keep them out of the monthly total, note them separately
Keep each currency in its own column. Do not convert to one currency yet, because a stale exchange rate will hide real changes later.
Step 3: check seats against people, 45 minutes
Open each vendor's admin page and compare seats billed against people who logged in during the last 30 days. Write down both numbers. This single column is where most of the recoverable money lives.
Step 4: make the cuts, 30 minutes
- Cancel anything with zero active users. There is nothing to discuss.
- Remove seats for people who have left, and for anyone who has not logged in for two months.
- Pick one tool where you have two doing the same job.
- Downgrade tiers you outgrew in the wrong direction.
- Move the tools you are certain about to annual billing, which is usually two months cheaper.
Step 5: make it stick, 20 minutes
Put every renewal date on one calendar, assign each tool an owner, and set a reminder a week before each renewal. The audit only stays valid if someone sees the next charge coming.
If you would rather not do steps 1 to 3 by hand, that is precisely what Submole automates: it reads the billing emails, builds the normalised monthly list with the source invoice attached to every line, and keeps the renewal calendar current. The seven day trial has everything unlocked and does not ask for a card, so you can run the whole audit before deciding anything.