SaaS Audit from Your Card Statement in One Afternoon
A SaaS audit answers three questions: what software does the company pay for, who uses it and when does each subscription renew. You can answer the first and third from one card statement export in an afternoon, and this guide shows the steps.
Last updated 2026-10-27
What a SaaS audit is and why a statement is enough
A SaaS audit is a review of every software subscription a company pays for. Surveys of employees and checks of an admin console miss tools bought on a card. Your statement does not miss them, because every paid subscription leaves a charge. That makes the statement the most complete starting point for finance and IT.
Gather the exports
Collect 90 days of transactions from every source that pays for software: the corporate card, the main bank account, any expense tool and any team cards. Ninety days catches monthly charges three times and most quarterly charges once. For annual subscriptions, take 12 months from at least the main card, because yearly charges appear only once a year.
- CSV, XLSX or PDF exports all work.
- Keep one file per source, so you can see which card pays for what.
- Do not remove columns. Date, description and amount are enough.
Step 1, clean the descriptors
Card descriptors are noisy. A single tool can appear as a prefix plus a vendor name plus a city and a reference number. Strip card prefixes such as "SQ *", "PAYPAL *" and "DRI*", remove city names and numbers, and the same vendor starts to look identical on every line. Doing this by hand across hundreds of lines is the slow part of any manual audit.
Step 2, group recurring charges by vendor
Sort by vendor and look for repeats. A charge that appears every month at the same amount is a monthly subscription. The same amount every three months is quarterly. One large charge a year is annual. The gap between charges gives you the billing cycle, and the last charge plus the cycle gives you the predicted renewal date.
Step 3, separate software from everything else
Not every recurring charge is software. Rent, insurance and utilities repeat too. Mark each vendor as software or not, then assign a category such as communication, design, analytics, security or developer tools. Categories matter later, because they reveal where you pay twice.
Step 4, calculate the annual cost
Convert every subscription to a yearly figure. Monthly times twelve, quarterly times four, annual as is. A $40 monthly tool is a $480 yearly commitment, and an annual contract renews with no reminder unless you create one. Add the totals by category and compare them with the budget line your finance team expects.
Step 5, assign an owner to every tool
For each tool, write down who bought it and who uses it. Tools without an owner are the first candidates for cancellation. Ask the owner two questions: is it still used, and is the plan size still right. A short message to each owner is faster than a meeting.
Let the list build itself
Everything above is mechanical work, which is why it takes most people a week of spare hours. SassList does the first four steps from the file. It reads your CSV, XLSX or PDF in the browser, normalizes descriptors, matches them against a built-in dictionary of about 600 SaaS vendors, groups recurring charges and infers the cycle and the next renewal date. You can read how the pieces connect on how it works.
What stays private
The statement is read in your browser. Only descriptors that look like software but are not in the dictionary are sent to the server for classification, and amounts, dates and account numbers are not sent. No bank login is needed. The security page describes it in detail.
What you get
The result is a SaaS list with vendor, category, monthly and annual cost, billing cycle, last charge and predicted renewal. Duplicate categories are flagged when two or more vendors share one. If the audit is for finance, the software spend management page shows how the same list feeds monthly reporting.
Turn findings into decisions
Sort the list by annual cost and work from the top. For each tool choose one action: keep, downsize, consolidate or cancel. Record the date by which the decision must be made, and that date must come before the renewal notice period starts. A tool that renews in 20 days with a 30 day notice clause has already locked in another term.
Set alerts so the audit stays true
An audit is a snapshot, and software spend changes every month. SassList emails you 30, 14 and 7 days before each predicted renewal, so the next decision happens while you can still act. Pair the alerts with a SaaS renewal calendar and the work does not repeat from zero next quarter.
Look for overlap
Check categories with more than one vendor. Teams often hold two video call tools, two project trackers or three note taking apps. Our guide to duplicate SaaS tools lists the categories where overlap is most common and how to consolidate them.
Run it again
Repeat the audit each quarter with a fresh export. Compare the tool count and annual total with the last run. If both rise faster than headcount, the next conversation is about buying rules, not about individual tools.