A full inventory of your software subscriptions, and their real total

Twenty three euros a month for video calls, forty five for electronic signatures, thirty for file sharing. Taken one by one, each price looks reasonable. Nobody has ever added them all together, because nobody has the full list in front of them: each tool was chosen by a different person, paid with a different card, and billed on a different schedule.

Why this total exists nowhere#

A building materials distributor, a heating contractor, a wholesaler: the software bill grows in small pieces. Sales asked for a prospecting tool. The accountant picked an electronic signature tool for urgent quotes. Someone opened a storage subscription because attachments stopped going through by email.

Each expense was approved on its own, often under €100 a month, too small an amount to reach a management meeting. Accounting books them by category (services, miscellaneous subscriptions), not by tool. The result: nobody in the company can answer, in one sentence, the question "how much do we spend on software, in total?"

This is not limited to small structures. At a distributor with several hundred employees, four software tools alone cost €190,000 a year, and nobody had done the addition before it was asked.

The method, in four columns#

No tool needed to start: a spreadsheet is enough.

To fill it in:

1. List everything that charges a card or sends a recurring invoice. The company card statement and the bank account give most of it in ten minutes.
2. Ask each manager for the exact price of what they use. Not an estimate: the amount written on the last invoice.
3. Look for duplicates. Two tools doing the same job, bought by two people who never spoke to each other, happens more often than expected.
4. Add it all up. The total almost always surprises, because it never existed before this calculation.

A total that almost always surprises#

Take a building materials distributor with around twenty employees. Here is what the inventory shows once the invoices are gathered.

The total: €5,964 a year, not counting the main business management software. No single line goes above €150 a month. That is exactly why nobody saw it coming: each line, taken alone, never justified a second look.

What changes with an application built for the company#

Part of these functions do not need to stay scattered. Team scheduling, time tracking, quote signing and lead tracking describe the work of the same company, not four different trades. In an application built for it, a salesperson follows a lead, prepares a quote, and gets it signed electronically without leaving the screen. The team manager sees the schedule and the recorded hours in the same place. One fixed price replaces the sum of small invoices, and no new subscription gets added when a new need appears: a screen gets added instead.

What stays separate anyway#

The inventory should not push toward merging everything. Business email, accounting and banking tools stay separate products: they are not business-specific tools, and good, affordable software already exists for them. The goal is not to gather everything into one application, but to stop paying in pieces for what describes the core of the business.

Software subscriptions inventory: the key takeaways#

The total of your software subscriptions appears in no existing document, because nobody has a reason to calculate it until someone asks. A four-column table and one hour are enough to make it appear, and it is almost always higher than expected.

Once that total is visible, the question changes: not "can we do without this subscription" anymore, but "how many of them actually describe the same business". That is the question answered by the total cost of off-the-shelf software, and the one we answer with the price of an application built for a single company.