Your SaaS Subscriptions Are Quietly Draining Your Business — Here’s How to Find Out
At some point, every small business in Chico ends up in the same place: paying for software nobody remembers signing up for.
It usually starts reasonably enough. You needed a tool for electronic signatures, so someone grabbed one. A new hire had a project management app they liked, so the team started using it. A vendor sent a free trial that converted to paid after 30 days and nobody caught it. A previous employee used a scheduling tool that’s still billing the card on file.
None of these decisions were wrong at the time. The problem is they pile up, and because most SaaS subscriptions are $20, $50, or $80 a month — small enough not to trigger a second look — they keep running indefinitely.
For a typical 10 to 20-person business around here, the surprise total is usually somewhere between $600 and $1,500 per month. That’s before asking whether the tools are actually being used.
Why This Gets Away From Small Businesses
Large companies have IT departments and procurement processes. If a software purchase needs approval, someone’s reviewing the list. Small businesses in Gridley, Paradise, or Chico usually don’t work that way. The owner approves things, or the office manager handles it, or whoever needed the tool just signed up with a company card.
There’s no one place where all of it lives. Subscriptions might be spread across two credit cards, a PayPal account, and a bank account used for miscellaneous expenses. Some are annual charges that hit once and disappear from memory until they renew.
And because modern software is designed to be sticky — free trials, annual discounts, bundled features you might use someday — the list only grows.
What a Real Audit Looks Like
This doesn’t require software or a consultant. It requires about two hours and access to your financial statements.
Step 1: Pull 90 Days of Statements
Export or print three months of transactions from every card and account your business uses for expenses. Look for anything recurring. You’re looking for:
- Monthly charges in the $10–$200 range from company names you recognize as software
- Annual charges that might have renewed without notice
- Charges from names you don’t recognize at all (those deserve a closer look)
Make a simple list: vendor name, monthly cost, who in the office uses it, what it does.
Step 2: Check for Overlap
This is where most businesses find the money. Software subscriptions overlap constantly because Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace each include tools that businesses routinely pay for separately.
Common overlaps worth checking:
- Video conferencing: Are you paying for Zoom if your team is already on Microsoft Teams? Both are fine tools. Paying for both is often redundant.
- File storage: Dropbox or Box alongside OneDrive or Google Drive. Pick one.
- Electronic signatures: DocuSign is a great product. It’s also something Microsoft 365 and Adobe Acrobat can do depending on your plan.
- Forms and surveys: SurveyMonkey alongside Microsoft Forms or Google Forms, both of which come with subscriptions you already have.
- Password management: Some businesses are paying for a standalone password manager while their IT provider already includes one in a security package. Check before you pay twice.
A Durham almond operation we’ve heard about was carrying both Dropbox and OneDrive because different people set up each one during different seasons. Neither was wrong. Together they were $40/month for storage that one of them already covered.
Step 3: Ask the Actual Users
For each tool on your list, ask the person who’s supposed to be using it: when did you last log in? If nobody can remember, that’s your answer.
Tools people haven’t touched in 90 days are almost always safe to cancel. If someone raises a hand and says they need it, that’s useful to know — and it might prompt a conversation about whether a cheaper alternative exists.
Step 4: Cancel Deliberately, Not Impulsively
Before canceling anything, check two things:
- Is there data inside it you need to export first? Some tools hold documents, contacts, or history that you’ll want before the account closes.
- Is it on an annual contract that won’t save you money by canceling mid-term?
For anything with active data, export before canceling. For annual contracts with months remaining, add a calendar reminder to cancel before the next renewal date rather than eating the rest of the term.
The Bigger Picture: Someone Needs to Own This
The audit is useful. The habit is more useful.
The businesses that don’t end up in this situation typically have a simple policy: all software purchases, even small ones, go through one person or one card, and that person reviews the list twice a year. It doesn’t need to be complicated. A shared spreadsheet with the tool name, cost, owner, and renewal date is enough.
For businesses using Microsoft 365, there’s a decent admin view that shows assigned licenses across your organization. If you’ve been handing out licenses as people join without removing them when people leave, that’s often another source of unnecessary cost. A 15-person office that’s hired and turned over employees for three years might have 20 or 25 active licenses.
A Note on AI Tools Specifically
AI subscriptions are becoming their own category of sprawl. ChatGPT Plus, Copilot for Microsoft 365, Gemini, standalone writing tools, standalone image tools — the market is moving fast and people are signing up experimentally.
That’s fine. These tools are worth trying. The thing worth adding to your audit: some of them have access to your business data, your files, your email. Before you let one of those subscriptions run for six months unused, it’s worth checking what account it was connected to and whether it still has access.
This isn’t a reason to avoid AI tools. It’s a reason to keep track of them the same way you’d keep track of anything else that connects to your business accounts.
What to Do This Week
If you want to start small, here’s the shortest version of this:
Pull 90 days of statements. Look for any software charge you couldn’t immediately explain to someone. That’s your list. Start there.
For most Chico-area businesses, that exercise will find somewhere between $100 and $400 a month in charges worth a second look. Some will turn out to be worth keeping. Some won’t. Either way, you’ll know what you’re paying for.
That’s more than most businesses can say right now.