How to audit your software licences in an afternoon

Most small businesses are paying for software the way they pay for a gym membership: enthusiastically at signup, then never again on purpose. Seats bought for people who left. Two tools that do the same job because two teams chose differently. An annual renewal that fired last month and nobody noticed. An afternoon of structured looking usually finds five to fifteen percent of the software budget sitting idle.

Build the one spreadsheet that matters

Every licence audit starts from the same sheet. One row per tool, and these columns:

• Tool name and vendor
• Seats paid for, and seats actually active in the last 30 days
• Monthly cost, and annual cost
• Renewal date and notice period
• Owner: the one person who decides whether to keep it
• Overlap: what else on this list does the same job

The two columns that pay for the afternoon are seats active in the last 30 days and overlap. Everything else is bookkeeping.

Find the source of truth for each tool

Pull active-user counts from the admin console of each major platform, whether Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, your CRM, your design tools all expose last-active dates. The gap between paid seats and active seats is your first refund. For most teams the biggest single line is identity: seats provisioned for onboarding that were never reclaimed at offboarding.

You are not looking for the tool you hate. You are looking for the seat nobody has opened since spring.

Kill the overlaps out loud

Overlap is political, which is why it survives. Two project trackers, three places to store files, a video tool per department. Rationalising them saves real money but requires a decision and an owner willing to make it. List the overlaps, name the owner, and give each a decision date. The spreadsheet does not resolve the argument; it just makes the cost of not resolving it visible.

Put every renewal on one calendar

The quiet money-loser is the auto-renewal you forgot. Take the renewal-date column, drop every date onto a single shared calendar with an alert set to the notice period, and you will never again pay for a year of something you meant to cancel. This one step, done once, tends to outsave the seat reclamation over a full year.

None of this needs a procurement platform. It needs one sheet, one afternoon, and a named owner for each line. We run this quarterly for clients, and the first pass almost always pays for a quarter of our fee on its own.