How I untangled a vendor mess that was quietly costing us $1,400 a month

I thought our software spend was under control. A 90-minute audit found $1,400 a month of waste hiding in plain sight. Here is the framework I used and now run every quarter.

Step 1: List every recurring charge

I pulled three months of card and bank statements and wrote down every recurring payment. Not from memory, from the statements. Memory misses the ones that hurt.

Step 2: Map each to an owner and a purpose

For every charge: who uses this, and what for? Four items had no clear answer. Two were tools we replaced a year ago and never canceled.

Step 3: Find the overlaps

We were paying for three different tools that all stored files, and two that both sent email campaigns. Overlap is where the real money hides.

Step 4: Cancel, consolidate, renegotiate

We cut the dead subscriptions, consolidated the overlaps into one tool each, and called two vendors to renegotiate. Total recovered: about $1,400 a month.

I now run this exact audit quarterly. It takes 90 minutes and has never failed to find something. Vendor sprawl is not a one-time cleanup, it is a habit you maintain.