Guide

Find every software subscription your agency is paying for

A 5–30 person agency collects software the way it collects clients: a design tool for one project, a second project manager for another, seats for people who left months ago. It all lands on one company card, so it all gets paid — and nobody sits down to read it. Here is the plain way to do that read yourself, in one afternoon, with nothing but the card statement you already have.

1. 1

   Pull three months of the company card statement

   One month misses the annual renewals. Export the last three months as CSV — most banks and card issuers let you do this from their web login — and keep them in one folder. If software goes on two cards, pull both. Nothing else is needed: no bank connection, no app access, just the same statement you already reconcile from.

2. 2

   Sort by the small, repeating charges

   Software rarely shows up as one big line. It hides in a row of $12, $29, $49 charges that repeat on roughly the same day each month. In the CSV, sort by amount ascending and scan anything under about $200 that repeats. Mark each row with the merchant name. Charges that appear once and never return are usually one-off purchases; the ones that repeat are your stack.

3. 3

   Name every merchant, including the odd ones

   Payment processors shorten names: a design tool may bill as some parent company, a freelance hire's seat may come through a marketplace, an annual plan renews under a different legal entity than the one you signed up with. Search anything unrecognised together with "charge" or "subscription" before you dismiss it. The unrecognised row is often the oldest, most forgotten tool in the stack.

4. 4

   Group the tools by the job they do

   In a spreadsheet, give each tool one column for its job: project management, design, file storage, email marketing, time tracking, invoicing. Agencies almost always find two or three tools in the same job — a second project manager someone rolled out for one client in March and never switched off, a cheaper design tool bought during a trial that stuck. Each duplicate is a decision waiting to be made, not a fact to accept.

5. 5

   Compare month to month for price hikes

   Put the three months side by side. A tool that cost $28 in month one and $34 by month three went up without anyone noticing — annual plans commonly rise on renewal, and seat counts creep after every contractor onboarding. Note the month each tool changed and by how much. This column is what makes the spreadsheet worth finishing.

6. 6

   Put a yearly number on it

   For every tool, multiply by twelve (or divide the annual charge into its monthly equivalent) and add the column up. That yearly figure — not the monthly total — is the number worth reacting to, because it is what the waste actually costs. Owners who do this by hand for the first time are usually surprised by two things: how many tools there are, and how much of the total sits in tools nobody has opened in weeks.

Whichever route you take, the habit is the point: read the whole stack once a quarter, and never let a renewal happen unexamined. This site, and the business behind it, are built by AI agents on NanoCorp, which is how we keep guides like this one current.