Buying better software gets a lot of attention. Paying for less of it gets very little, and for most small businesses it is the larger and faster win.
This takes about ninety minutes.
Step 1: get the actual list
Not the list you think you have. The real one comes from three places:
- Your card and bank statements for the last three months. Software charges hide well among other recurring costs.
- Your email, searched for “receipt”, “invoice”, “your subscription”, and “renewal”.
- Whoever else in the business can spend money. Tools bought on a personal card and expensed are the ones that go missing.
Write down every line with what it costs monthly. Convert annual charges to a monthly figure so everything is comparable.
Step 2: mark what each one is for
One phrase per tool, describing the job it does. Not the product category — the job. “Sends the monthly newsletter.” “Where the client files live.” “Books appointments.”
Two things fall out of this immediately: tools you cannot describe a job for, and jobs described more than once.
Step 3: find the duplicates
Duplicate capability is the most common source of waste, and it is rarely obvious, because the tools are in different categories. An all-in-one platform that includes email will overlap with a dedicated email tool. A project tool with file storage overlaps with your file storage. A CRM with a scheduling feature overlaps with your booking tool.
For each duplicated job, ask which tool you would keep if you had to pick one today. Often the answer is the one you did not expect, because the other was bought first.
Step 4: check usage before cutting
Before cancelling anything, look at when it was last actually used. Most tools show a last-login or last-activity date somewhere in account settings. A tool nobody has opened in three months is either genuinely unnecessary or was bought for something that never got started — and the second case is worth a conversation before it becomes a cancellation.
Step 5: check the tier, not just the tool
Some of the saving is not in cancelling but in downgrading. Plans get chosen at the moment of maximum optimism. Look at what each tier actually gives you and whether you are using the thing that justified the upgrade.
Watch for the reverse too: paying per seat for people who left.
Step 6: cancel deliberately, not all at once
Cancel in a sequence, not a session. Anything that stores data needs an export first. Anything customers touch — booking, email, payments — needs a replacement running before the old one stops. Anything you are unsure about, downgrade rather than cancel and revisit in a month.
What to expect
Most small businesses find one duplicated job, one tool nobody uses, and one tier above what they need. That combination is typically a meaningful monthly saving, and it costs nothing to act on.
It is also the honest first answer to “what software should I buy?” — sometimes the answer is less of it.
If you want a second opinion on what your stack should look like, building a PKG takes a couple of minutes and lets you enter what you already pay for, so it will not suggest a tool for a job you have already covered.