What your tool stack really costs you

Ask any ten-person company how many software subscriptions they pay for. Almost nobody gets it right first try, and almost everyone underestimates.

The one-afternoon audit

• Filter your bank and card statements for recurring charges.
• Note down each tool, its annual cost and who actually uses it.
• Flag the ones that overlap with each other.
• Flag the ones nobody has opened in the last month.

The costs that don't show up on the statement

The visible cost is the subscription fee. The invisible one is the time spent maintaining integrations, training every new hire on seven tools, reconciling duplicated data that doesn't match, and decisions made late because the information is split up.

The right question

It isn't "how much do we spend on software?" but "how much does it cost us that our software isn't connected?". The first is answered with a sum. The second explains why the company moves slower than it should.

Software spend is almost never the problem. The problem is what it costs to stitch it together every day.