Hidden IT Costs in a 100-Employee Company: The Exercise That Saves 15-30% of Your Budget

Daniel Sarica

Published: April 15, 2026

The IT budget your management team knows about is almost always incomplete. Costs are spread across departments, across cards, across different cost centers, and nobody adds them up.
What follows is a practical exercise. It takes 3-4 hours, and almost every time it surfaces savings of 15-30%.

What you need before you start

The IT invoices from the last 12 months (ask accounting for them - all of them, not just the ones coded as “IT”)
The company’s card statements (for the small subscriptions paid directly)
30 minutes with IT
15 minutes with 3-4 department heads

The collection (2 hours)

Gather everything related to IT. Include the things that don’t look like IT at first glance:

Software licenses (Microsoft, Adobe, ERP, CRM, antivirus, project management)
Cloud subscriptions (Azure, AWS, Google Workspace, Dropbox, extra OneDrive storage)
Maintenance contracts (servers, network equipment, printers)
Backup services
Phone and internet
Tools bought by departments on their own
Subscriptions paid on personal cards and expensed
AI tools (ChatGPT, Copilot, transcription, design, and coding tools)

Ask accounting to search by vendor, not by budget category. Many IT costs are coded under “operations” or “marketing” or “sales.” In one 100-employee company, we found IT costs spread across 6 different cost centers - nobody had ever added them all up.
One trick that helps: search the bank statements for recurring payments to software companies. Stripe, PayPal, small monthly card charges - that’s usually where the subscriptions nobody remembers anymore are hiding.

The master spreadsheet (1 hour)

Put everything into a single spreadsheet:

A simple Excel file - don’t overcomplicate it with sophisticated formats. The goal is to have everything in one place, not to build a pretty dashboard.

The verification (1 hour)

Show the spreadsheet to IT and ask:

Is there anything that’s not on here?
Of these, which are actually used and which aren’t?
Are there tools employees use that aren’t on the list?

Do the same with 3-4 department heads. Things usually surface that even IT doesn’t know about. In one company, the marketing department was separately paying for a $200/month email marketing tool that IT had never heard of. In another, sales had a CRM they paid for out of the department budget, running in parallel with the “official” CRM that IT maintained.

The 5 things you’re looking for in the spreadsheet

1. Licenses for people who left the company

There almost always are some. Every unused Microsoft E3 license costs ~$36/month. At 10 forgotten licenses, that’s over $4,300/year. In a 120-employee company we found 45 paid Zoom licenses, of which only 12 were actively used. 33 licenses × $22/month = close to $9,000/year on Zoom alone. And that was a single tool out of some 15 active subscriptions.

2. Duplicate subscriptions

Two project management tools bought by different departments. Two cloud storage services. Two video conferencing platforms. Ask: did the departments know about each other? Usually, the answer is no. Each solved an immediate need without checking what already existed.

3. Contracts that renew automatically

Maintenance services for equipment that has already been replaced. SLAs with terms from 3 years ago that nobody has reread. Vendors you no longer actively work with, but the invoice keeps arriving. We once found a maintenance contract that had been renewing for two years for a server that had already been decommissioned and was sitting in storage.

4. Oversized licenses

Enterprise licenses for 500 users when you have 80. Premium plans when the standard tier covers everything you need. Paid features nobody uses. The difference between a standard plan and a premium one can be 50-100% of the price, for features the company will never use. It’s worth asking the vendor: “what do I lose if I move to the smaller plan?”

5. Costs with no clear owner

If nobody in the company can explain why you’re paying for a particular service, it’s most likely no longer needed. At one company, we asked about a $150/month subscription. Nobody knew what it did. It turned out a former admin had bought it 3 years earlier for a project that had long since ended. $1,800/year on a service nobody was using.

How much you typically save

From my experience with companies of 80-120 employees:

Typical savings: 15-30% of the total IT budget
Average savings in dollars: $1,500-3,000/month
Time invested: 3-4 hours
Investment: zero

One concrete case: a 100-employee company with a real IT budget of $8,700/month. After the inventory, they cut $1,800/month without giving up anything they needed. Annual savings: over $21,000. The ROI of the exercise: infinite, because it cost nothing beyond 4 hours of work.

Checklist: 10 questions for your CFO

Can you see all of the company’s IT costs in one place?
Do you know how many software licenses you pay for, and how many are actually used?
When was the last time someone checked whether all active subscriptions are necessary?
Are there IT contracts that renew automatically? Do you know the exit terms?
Do departments buy tools on their own?
Are employees using AI tools? On what accounts? With what data?
Are there active licenses for employees who have left the company?
How many different IT vendors does the company have?
What is the total IT cost per employee per month?
Who in the company has the authority to approve a new IT subscription?

If you answered “I don’t know” to more than 3, the exercise above is probably worth doing.

How you keep control afterward

The inventory exercise isn’t something you do once and you’re done. IT costs creep back, because people will keep buying tools, contracts will renew, and new employees will bring new preferences.
What works: a full inventory once a year (4 hours, on the calendar), a quick quarterly review of the contracts coming up for renewal (30 minutes), and one clear rule: every new subscription goes through a single person (the CFO, the office manager, or IT - but someone specific).
Put someone in charge - not IT (which has other priorities), but finance or an office manager. Once a year, 4 hours, and no more surprises.

If you want to understand your company’s real IT costs

If you don’t have a clear picture of all your IT costs, or you suspect there are expenses nobody is monitoring, you can start with a short conversation where we review your current structure and identify the areas where money is being lost.