Your clients are overpaying for software.
And you can prove it.
The average organization wastes 30 to 40% of its SaaS budget every year.
Subscriptions auto-renew. People leave and their licenses stay active. One department buys a tool another already pays for. By the time a client notices, months of spend are already gone. This guide gives you the process to surface it before they do.
What's Inside
Everything you need to run a SaaS audit from first conversation to delivered outcome.
The guide covers how to pull every active subscription from billing, identity providers, and department surveys, and why all three sources are necessary. It walks through how to find duplicate subscriptions, unused licenses, and the six categories where SaaS waste hides in almost every client stack. It covers how to present findings so they land as a dollar number, how to assign ownership so the inventory stays current, and how to position the engagement as an ongoing service. The 30-day action plan at the end maps every step from intake to client debrief to quarterly review.
FAQs
What is a SaaS software inventory?
A SaaS software inventory is a maintained record of every software subscription an organization is paying for, actively using, or contractually tied to. It captures the tool name, owner, renewal date, licenses purchased, licenses in active use, and total cost. Unlike a one-time audit, it is updated continuously so unused license waste and duplicate subscriptions are caught before they compound.
What is the difference between a SaaS audit and a software asset inventory?
A SaaS audit is a one-time snapshot. A software asset inventory is a living record maintained from that baseline. Organizations that only run audits return to the same problem within 12 months. Organizations with a maintained inventory catch subscription drift, duplicate tools, and vendor overbilling as they occur.
How do MSPs identify unused SaaS licenses for clients?
MSPs identify unused licenses by cross-referencing billing records, identity provider login data, and department surveys. Any tool with zero active users in the last 90 days is a cancellation candidate. SaaS management platforms like BetterTracker automate this detection across multiple client accounts simultaneously.
How do you detect duplicate SaaS subscriptions?
By categorizing every active tool and flagging any two that serve the same function. Common duplicates include multiple project management platforms, overlapping cloud storage, and redundant video conferencing tools. The deduplication step is most effective after billing, identity provider, and survey data have been combined into a single inventory.
What causes SaaS spend to go over budget?
The most common causes are zombie subscriptions still active after employee departures, shelfware that was never adopted, duplicate tools bought by different departments, over-licensed pricing tiers, auto-renewed free trials, and vendor overbilling. The average organization wastes 30 to 40 percent of its SaaS budget across these categories.
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