Where the extra money goes
The common leaks are predictable. Licences stay assigned to people who left months ago, because nobody told whoever manages the accounts. Staff are on premium plans when a basic one would do. Free trials converted to paid subscriptions on a company card. Two departments pay for different tools that do the same job. Storage add-ons were bought to solve a short-term problem and never removed.
Prices themselves also move. Vendors adjust pricing, sometimes yearly, and exchange rates change the NZ dollar cost of anything billed in US dollars. A subscription that looked small when it was approved may now cost noticeably more, without anyone deciding to spend extra. None of these items are large on their own, which is exactly why they survive.
Build one list of every subscription
You cannot control what you cannot see. Pull a year of card and bank statements and accounting transactions, and list every recurring software charge: the vendor, what it does, who uses it, how many seats, the cost per month, the renewal date and who owns the relationship. Include annual charges, which are easy to forget because they appear once a year. Keep this list somewhere shared, such as a spreadsheet in SharePoint or a simple register in your accounting system. The first version is always surprising. Small offices commonly find a handful of tools nobody can explain, and at least one that is being paid for twice.
Match licences to real people
For each major platform, such as Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, your CRM or design software, compare the licence list with your current staff list. Remove leavers, downgrade people who do not need premium features and look for shared accounts that should be proper named accounts or removed altogether. Be careful with leavers' data: keep or transfer their files and mailbox before releasing the licence.
Check commitment terms before you cut. Some subscriptions are annual commitments that can only be reduced at renewal, and cancelling early may not refund anything. Note the renewal date and set a reminder a month before so you can adjust at the right time rather than paying for another year.
Watch usage-based services closely
Rented servers, storage, backup and AI services that charge by usage can grow far faster than per-user subscriptions. A virtual machine left running after a test, a backup policy keeping every daily copy forever, or a storage account accumulating old files will all keep billing. Set budget alerts in Azure or your provider's console so someone is emailed when spending passes a threshold, and review the cost breakdown each month.
Schedule non-essential servers to shut down outside working hours, choose sensible retention periods for backups and archive old data to cheaper storage tiers. For a server that genuinely must run all the time, ask about reserved pricing, which usually reduces the cost in exchange for committing for a year or more.
Put a simple approval rule in place
Most cost creep starts with someone solving a problem by signing up for a tool on a card. That instinct is not bad, but the business needs to know. A one-line rule works well: any new paid software goes on the register before it is bought, with an owner named. That also gives the person who manages your security a chance to check whether the tool is safe for company data.
Make it easy to comply. If approval takes three weeks, people will work around it. A quick check, ideally within a day or two, keeps staff honest and keeps the list complete. Decide who can actually commit the business to a subscription. In many small offices any staff member with a company card can, which is convenient but means nobody sees the total. Limiting software purchases to one or two people, or to a single card used only for subscriptions, gives you one statement to read each month and makes unexpected charges stand out straight away.
Make the review a habit
Put a quarterly reminder in the calendar of whoever owns the register. Spend an hour updating it, compare the total with last quarter and ask about anything that grew. Once a year, before the busiest renewals, look at whether each tool is still the right one. Office IT includes a licence and subscription review in its health check, but any careful person in the business can run this routine with a spreadsheet and a bank statement.
When you find savings, record them. Noting that a quarterly review removed four unused licences and an old storage add-on helps justify the hour it takes, and it shows whoever approves budgets that the subscription total is being managed rather than simply paid. Over a year those small removals often add up to more than people expect.
In short
- Cost creep comes from leavers' licences, unused add-ons, duplicate tools and price changes.
- Keep one shared register of every subscription, owner and renewal date.
- Match licences to current staff each quarter, but preserve leavers' data first.
- Set budget alerts and auto-shutdown for usage-billed cloud services.