In most small companies we audit, somewhere between 15 and 30 percent of the IT bill is money nobody is consciously spending. It flows out by standing order, because "that's how it was set up at some point". An hour once a year is usually enough to fix it.
This is not a piece about cutting costs to the bone. Cutting IT costs "because we have to" usually ends with someone re-buying the same thing six months later for more money. This is something else: finding spend that produces no value. The kind of items you can switch off and nobody in the company will notice — except the accountant, who will see a smaller invoice.
A recurring picture: a services and engineering firm, 35 people. The first audit found 4 200 PLN per month in licenses nobody was using — a handful of Microsoft 365 accounts left from former employees, two different project management tools (one bought "to try out" three years ago), unused seats in Adobe Creative Cloud, and a support contract for a server that had long since moved to the cloud. Annual saving: more than 50 000 PLN. Without firing anyone, switching vendors, or doing a "transformation".
Where this comes from
IT costs in SMEs rarely jump in steps. They grow quietly, 200 PLN here, 400 PLN there, over several years. The classic sources:
- Someone bought a tool for a specific project — the project ended, the subscription didn't.
- An employee left — their licenses, accounts and access stayed active, because "maybe somebody new will need them".
- A department bought its own tool because the company one was "too slow" — now the company pays for both.
- A support contract on a fixed annual fee — auto-renews, nobody checks whether anyone actually uses it.
- A promotional rate from two years ago has long expired — the tariff has quietly jumped to list price.
None of these items is scary on its own. Together they can eat as much as an extra salary.
The license graveyard
This is the first and fastest place to look. All you need is to compare the list of active licenses (Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, Adobe, Slack, Asana, Jira, CAD/design software, antivirus, VPN) against the list of current employees.
In practice:
- Pull a list of active users from every admin panel.
- Match it against HR records — date of hire, date of termination.
- Mark accounts of former employees, contractors, and "test" accounts that quietly moved to production.
- Check whether freed seats can be returned within the current billing period or only at renewal.
Then the second step — actual usage. Most admin panels (Microsoft 365, Adobe, Slack) show the last sign-in date. An account that hasn't been used for 90 days is suspect. An account with no login in 180 days is almost certainly a kill candidate.
The same tool, bought twice
The second common area. In a 30-person company you can easily find Slack and Microsoft Teams running in parallel, two different project management systems, three note-taking apps and two password managers. Each department picked its own, each pays separately, nobody looks at the total picture.
The point isn't to force everyone onto one tool — that often ends in a team revolt. The point is a deliberate decision: what stays, what goes, who works on what. Sometimes the rational answer is "we keep two tools because production has different needs from sales". Fine — but that should be a conscious decision, not a result of nobody ever mapping it out.
Questions to ask:
- Do we have two tools doing the same job?
- Does anyone use both, or does each one serve a single group?
- How many people in that group actually use the tool every day?
- Could we get the same result in a tool we already pay for (e.g. Microsoft 365)?
Contracts you have forgotten
The most annoying category, because it requires going through invoices rather than admin panels. The classics:
- A support contract on hardware that's no longer in the building (the server went to recycling, the contract stayed).
- Domains and SSL certificates bought "in reserve" for a project that never launched.
- Hosting for a website the company no longer uses (e.g. a landing page from an old marketing campaign).
- A license for a second accounting package, because "we were testing it once".
- Mailboxes and phone numbers for ex-employees, kept "just in case someone writes".
The method is brutal but it works: take the list of cost invoices for the last 12 months, filter everything from IT suppliers, and for each line answer one question — who specifically in the company uses this, and what would happen if we switched it off. If you can't answer within 30 seconds, it's a candidate for cancellation.
How to run the audit
For a company up to 50 people, the whole audit can be done in 1-2 working days by one person, plus short conversations with department heads. A practical sequence:
- Accounting export — every IT, software and telecom cost invoice for the last 12 months. This is the baseline.
- List of active subscriptions — open each admin panel and write down who and how many seats are active.
- Cross-check with HR — who still works here, who left, when.
- Short talks with team leads — which tools are actually used, what nobody has opened for six months.
- Decisions in writing — what stays, what goes, who does it and when. Without that list, the audit changes nothing.
The most important thing: this audit is not a one-off. It's a ritual that should come back once every 12 months. Otherwise in two years there will be another 4 200 PLN per month to find.
What to do with the money you recover
The worst thing you can do with the savings is dump them into the general budget and forget. Better to assign them a purpose before you even start cutting. That way the audit stops being abstract and becomes a project that pays for itself.
Sensible targets we see most often: funding a stalled ERP migration, buying a proper backup setup (not "Google Drive will do"), MFA on all accounts, security awareness training for the team, or simply a reserve for a year of support on the integration the company has been trying to deploy for three years and "never has the money for".
If you'd like to go through an audit like this with someone from outside — because uncomfortable questions are easier to ask when you don't work at the company — it's one of the things we do most often in the first 30 days with a new client.
In most SMEs, 15-30% of the IT bill is spend nobody consciously decides on. An hour once a year is usually enough to fix it.