Open the statement for the account your business pays from, twelve months back, and count the lines that are software. First, without looking, write down how many subscriptions you think you have.

In our experience those two numbers rarely match. The statement is always the higher one.

Why the pile grows and never shrinks

Every one of those lines was a sensible decision on the day it was made. You needed a way to send quotes, someone had to get large files to the printer, a campaign needed a landing page in a hurry.

What makes it stack is the asymmetry. Signing up takes two minutes and a card number. Cancelling takes a login nobody has any more, a support form and a confirmation email. And each amount is small enough - £9, £19, £29 - to sit under the threshold where you would stop and ask a question.

Then people change jobs. The tool stays. The card keeps paying.

Build the list from the bank, not from memory

Export twelve months of transactions from your business account and card into a spreadsheet; nearly every bank offers CSV. Sort by description and the repeats jump straight out.

Watch for annual charges: a single payment eleven months ago is the easiest to miss and usually the largest. Watch for charges under a payment provider's name rather than the product's - you see the intermediary, not the tool. And watch for what never touches the business account at all: subscriptions in the app store of a company phone, a PayPal balance, a personal card someone never got round to changing.

Put it in five columns: what it is called, what it does, cost per month, who uses it, when it renews. One page. That page is the real deliverable here; the saving is a side effect.

Four questions per line

Does anyone open it in a normal week? Ask the team, don't guess. Most admin panels show the last login per user.

Do you already pay for something that does this? Overlap is the commonest waste: two file-sharing services, a notes app alongside an office suite, a standalone form builder next to a website that already has forms.

Is the plan the right size? Seats for people who left, storage bought for a project that ended, a "pro" tier taken for one feature you used once.

Monthly or yearly? Paying annually often saves fifteen to twenty per cent on the tools you are sure about, and locks you in on the ones you are still testing. Match the term to your confidence.

Two things to do before you cancel anything

First, get your data out. Customers, invoices, photos, message history: export them while the account is still live. Once the subscription lapses, access usually goes with it, and reopening a closed account takes far longer than you would like.

Second, mark the cheap lines that hold everything up. Your domain name, the DNS that points it at your site, your mail, your hosting, your backup: often ten or twenty a month, and the whole business leans on them. Write "do not touch" next to those, with the renewal date and the email address that owns the account. If that account is in the name of someone who has left, sorting it out is worth an afternoon - a lapsed domain takes your website and every address on it down at the same time.

What the hour is really worth

The saving is welcome. Eighty a month back is nearly a thousand a year. But the page is worth more than the money.

Next time someone proposes a new tool, you can compare it with the total rather than with its own price tag. £49 a month is cheap on its own and expensive as the thirteenth line. And when you ask for a quote, that page shows what you already own - often the difference between building something new and connecting two things you are already paying for. At ITSysPro we would rather start from that list than from a wish list, for exactly that reason.

What to do this week

  • Export twelve months of transactions and build the five-column list. Allow an hour.
  • Ask your team about three lines: when did you last use this? Cancel only what nobody can place.
  • Add the renewal date and account owner to the load-bearing lines: domain, mail, hosting, backup.

If you are not sure which lines are load-bearing and which can safely go, send the list over and we will look at it with you.