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HIFENCE

Software License and Subscription Audit: A Practical Guide for Companies with 60-150 Employees

Picture of Daniel Sarica, the founder of HIFENCE. Daniel Sarica

Published: July 7, 2026

In a company of 60-150 people, software costs almost always grow faster than the company itself. Not because anyone is making bad decisions, but because nobody is making a decision at all: every team picks its own tools, subscriptions renew automatically, people leave but their licenses stay, and the total only shows up in accounting, where nobody knows what each line item actually is.

The good news: this is one of the few areas in IT where you can recover money fast, with zero operational risk. In the audits we run, at a company that has never done this exercise before, 10-20% of the monthly software bill can be eliminated without anyone feeling the difference. We can help you with a cybersecurity audit.

Below is the process, step by step, the way we do it. It can be done in-house, in a few hours of actual work.

What we usually find

So you know what you’re looking for, here are the categories that show up in almost every inventory:

Licenses for people who are no longer with the company. The most common find and the easiest money to recover. Someone leaves, the account gets deactivated (sometimes), but the paid license stays assigned. At 10-15 departures a year, it adds up.

Duplicate tools. Marketing has one project management tool, operations has another, and someone is still paying for a third one “from the old days.” Three subscriptions, one function.

Oversized plans. An enterprise subscription bought for a feature that also exists in the standard plan. Nobody has checked since the purchase what is actually being used.

Forgotten services. Hosting for a website that no longer exists, a CRM someone tried two years ago, domains, duplicated storage. Small amounts individually that together add up to a serious subscription.

Unused “included” bundles. Modules bought as a package with the main system, never activated.

Step 1: gather the data (1-2 hours)

You need three sources:

  • The last 12 months of invoices from accounting - everything that is software, licenses, subscriptions, hosting, cloud services. Twelve months, not one: some subscriptions are annual and don’t show up in just any month.
  • The company’s card statements. Many small subscriptions never go through “official” invoices - someone put them on the company card two years ago.
  • The admin consoles for your major platforms (Microsoft 365 / Google Workspace and your main business system). That’s where you pull the list of paid users and each person’s last login date.

Step 2: build the inventory (1 hour)

One single table, with a row for every tool and six columns: what it is, who uses it (the team), who owns it (a person, not a department), monthly cost, paid users, active users in the last 30 days.
The last two columns are the whole exercise. The difference between them is money paid for nothing.
If you can’t fill in “who owns it” for a tool, you’ve already found a problem - a cost that nobody defends and nobody checks.

Step 3: ask the teams (30 minutes per team)

The consoles show you who logged in. They don’t show you whether the tool actually helps. One simple question for each team lead: “from this list, what did you use last week, and what haven’t you opened in a month?” The answers differ surprisingly often from what management believes is being used.

Step 4: decide, across four categories

For every row in the inventory, one of four decisions:

Cut: zero users or a forgotten service. This is the fastest money.
Reduce: fewer seats or a smaller plan. Same function, lower cost.
Consolidate: two or three tools that do the same thing become one. It takes longer, but it eliminates data fragmentation too, not just cost.
Keep: it gets used, it delivers value, it has an owner.

Two warnings before you cut anything: check whether the tool is connected to others (an integration feeding another system may not show up in “active users”), and check the cancellation terms on annual contracts - on some, the notice window is 60-90 days before renewal, and if you miss it, you pay for another year.

Step 5: put something in place, so you don’t redo the exercise from scratch every year

The audit cleans up the past. To keep the accumulation from starting again the next day, three rules are enough:

  • Every new subscription goes through a simple approval - an email to one single person who keeps the inventory. Not bureaucracy; a single point where everything stays visible.
  • Every tool has an owner with a first and last name.
  • Once a year, the inventory gets re-read. With the table already built, it takes an hour, not a day.

How much you realistically recover

It depends on how long it has been since the last exercise of this kind. At companies that have never done it, 10-20% of the monthly software cost is the typical result - money that comes back from the first month on, and every month after. Just as valuable, though, is the side effect: for the first time, software cost becomes a list someone can read and defend, not a total that grows on its own.

The license inventory is, in fact, one of the first pieces we build in an IT cost assessment, precisely because it’s the area with the best ratio of effort to result.