How to get an overview of your company's subscriptions

Ask the managing director of a mid-sized business how many subscriptions the company has, and you'll rarely get a precise answer. Ask what they cost in total per year, and the answer gets even vaguer. That's no surprise: subscriptions are bought by different people, paid in different ways and billed at different intervals. This guide shows how to go from a fuzzy picture to an overview you can actually use – the core of good SaaS management.

Why the overview disappears

Before you start, it helps to understand why things get messy:

• Decentralised purchasing. With SaaS, anyone can start using a tool with a company card. Marketing, sales and IT each buy their own.
• Different billing. Some things are billed monthly, some quarterly, some yearly. Some are charged to a card, some arrive as invoices, some are in euros or dollars.
• Automatic renewal. Agreements roll on without anyone actively deciding.
• No owner. When the person who bought it changes jobs, the subscription is orphaned.

The result is usually overlapping tools, licences for people who have left, and price increases nobody has noticed.

Step 1: Map what you have

The fastest route to a first list is to follow the money.

Go through the accounts

Pull a list of suppliers and transactions for the last 12–24 months from your accounting system. Look especially for:

• suppliers that invoice regularly,
• accounts for software, licences, rentals and subscriptions,
• card transactions from well-known SaaS vendors.

Ask the departments

Send a short request to each department head: which tools and services do you use, who is responsible, and where is the agreement? You'll almost always find something that wasn't visible in the accounts, such as free tiers about to become paid, or agreements billed through a partner.

Don't forget what isn't software

Getting an overview of company subscriptions isn't only about SaaS. Include leases, insurance, service contracts, phone plans, rent, cleaning and other recurring agreements with deadlines.

Step 2: Record the right information

For each agreement, capture at least:

1. Vendor, ideally with an organisation number to avoid duplicates.
2. Category, such as software, office, vehicles or insurance.
3. Owner and deputy – who's responsible, and who takes over in their absence?
4. Cost centre or department.
5. Current term: start date and expiry date.
6. Notice period and whether the agreement renews automatically.
7. Price, with currency and billing frequency.
8. Number of licences, where relevant.
9. The contract itself, stored where everyone who needs it can find it.

Step 3: Convert everything to annual cost

To compare, all costs need to be on the same scale. The most practical is annual cost excluding VAT:

• Monthly price × 12
• Quarterly price × 4
• Foreign currencies converted to your home currency. Note the rate and the date you used, so the figures can be checked later.

Once everything is shown as annual cost, you can sort the list and see which agreements really matter. Often a handful of agreements account for a large share of the total.

Step 4: Track how prices change

Knowing what an agreement costs today isn't enough. You also want to know how the cost has changed – and why.

CPI-linked adjustments

Many agreements allow the vendor to adjust the price in line with the consumer price index, often once a year. Each adjustment may only be a few per cent, but it comes year after year, on many agreements at once. Separating CPI adjustments from other price changes shows how much of your cost growth is down to the index, and how much is down to more licences or new terms.

Record the reason for every change

Useful reasons to distinguish between:

• new agreement,
• renewal,
• CPI adjustment,
• renegotiated,
• quantity change.

With a reason on every change, it becomes much easier to answer questions like “why have our software costs gone up 18 per cent?”.

Step 5: Use the overview

An overview is only worth something if it's used. Some good questions to ask regularly:

• What renews in the next 90 days? These are the agreements you can still do something about.
• Which ten agreements have increased most? Good candidates for renegotiation.
• Do we have overlapping tools? Two tools for the same job are a common source of waste.
• Are we paying for licences nobody uses? Compare licence counts with active users.
• What did we save from terminations last year? It's a good motivator to keep going.

Step 6: Keep it up to date

The most common reason overviews die is that nobody maintains them. A few things that help:

• Make it a rule that new agreements are recorded before the first invoice is paid.
• Assign an owner to every agreement, and review ownership when someone leaves.
• Confirm the new price whenever an agreement renews.
• Schedule a short review each quarter, or read a weekly digest of upcoming deadlines.

Spreadsheet or tool?

For a handful of agreements and one responsible person, a good spreadsheet can do the job. When several people share responsibility, agreements auto-renew and prices change, keeping it current gets hard – and a spreadsheet won't tell you when a deadline is approaching.

In short

An overview of company subscriptions takes four things: a complete list, costs on the same scale, history with reasons, and a routine that keeps it current. Start with the accounts, ask the departments, convert to annual cost and keep an eye on CPI adjustments.

Licens is built for exactly this: every agreement is normalised to annual cost excluding VAT, price history is stored with reasons, and the dashboard shows what's renewing soon and which agreements have increased most. If you already have a spreadsheet, you can import it.