How to Audit Your SaaS Stack in a Weekend

What You Are Trying to Find

A SaaS audit has three outputs: a complete inventory of every active tool and its cost, a map of who owns each one, and a prioritised list of candidates for cancellation, consolidation, or renegotiation.

The reason to do this in a focused weekend sprint rather than gradually is that the work requires access to multiple systems simultaneously. Starting and stopping over weeks means you end up with a partial picture that is harder to act on.

Day 1 Morning: Pull All Payment Sources

Start with money. Every SaaS tool that your company pays for appears as a charge somewhere. Your job on Day 1 morning is to find all the places money goes out.

• Company credit cards: download 12 months of statements for each card
• AP system: pull recurring vendor payments from your accounting software
• Bank accounts: look for ACH debits to software vendors
• Expense reports: SaaS often gets purchased on personal cards and expensed
• Employee-reported: send a one-question survey to department heads asking what tools their team pays for directly

Day 1 Afternoon: Normalize and Categorize

Paste all the transactions into a spreadsheet. Normalize vendor names aggressively — Salesforce.com, Salesforce Inc, and SFDC are all the same vendor. Then categorize each by function: CRM, project management, communications, analytics, design, development, HR, security, and so on.

Flag any vendor that appears more than once under a different name or payment method — this is how you detect tools paid for through multiple channels.

By end of Day 1, you should have a single list with every recurring vendor, its annualised cost, and a functional category. This is your baseline inventory.

Day 2 Morning: Map Ownership and Usage

For each tool in your inventory, answer three questions: who owns it, how many people use it, and is there a contract on file.

Check your SSO provider or identity platform for active users per application if you have one. If not, email department heads and ask for utilization estimates. Imperfect data here is fine — you are looking for outliers: tools with very low adoption relative to their seat count or cost.

• Owner: the person accountable for the renewal decision
• Active users: monthly active users over the last 3 months
• Licensed seats: look at the contract or vendor portal
• Utilization rate: active users divided by licensed seats
• Contract on file: yes or no

Day 2 Afternoon: Identify Opportunities

With ownership and usage data in hand, run four filters across your inventory.

• Utilization below 50%: strong candidate for seat reduction or cancellation
• Duplicate functional category: two or more tools doing the same job for different teams
• No identified owner: governance risk and audit target
• No contract on file: unknown terms, renewal dates, and notice windows

Prioritizing the Action List

Not everything you find needs action this week. Prioritize by annualised value multiplied by ease of action. A $50,000 tool with 30% utilization and a renewal in 45 days is your first call Monday morning. A $500 tool with no contract on file is next week.

Structure your action list into three buckets: act before the next renewal window, investigate further before deciding, and acceptable as-is. The third bucket is important — not every low-utilization tool is waste. Some are infrastructure.

What to Do After the Audit

The audit is the start of a process, not the end. Once you have your inventory and action list, assign owners to every contract and set renewal alerts 120, 90, and 60 days before each notice deadline.

Plan to repeat a lighter version of this audit quarterly — checking for new tools added since the last review, ownership changes from departures, and upcoming renewals without decisions.

Teams that run quarterly reviews consistently spend less on SaaS than teams that do annual audits. The difference is catching waste early, before it compounds across another full year.