The 90-Minute Founder SaaS Audit

Most founders avoid auditing their SaaS spend because it sounds like a project — the kind of thing that needs a finance hire, a procurement process, and a free week nobody has. It doesn't. You can get from "no idea what we pay for" to "prioritized cut list" in 90 minutes. Here's the time-boxed version, built for a founder with a laptop and a billing inbox.

Set a timer. The constraint is the point — this is a first-pass audit, not a perfect one.

Minutes 0–25: Pull the billing trail

Open your main billing inbox and run these searches one at a time, listing every distinct vendor that appears:

receipt · invoice · payment received · your subscription · renews · free trial · welcome to · your plan · auto-renew

Then open every card the business uses — company card, your personal card, any employee cards, PayPal, app store billing — and skim the last 90 days for recurring charges. Add any vendor you didn't already catch from email.

Don't analyze. Don't make decisions. Just collect names. Speed matters more than completeness here; you'll refine in the next pass.

Minutes 25–45: Build the one-table inventory

Make a single spreadsheet. One row per tool. Columns:

Vendor · Monthly cost · Cadence (mo/yr) · Category · Owner · Used? (Y/N/?)

Fill in what you know fast. Leave blanks where you're unsure — the blanks are findings. Convert annual costs to monthly (÷12) so everything's comparable, but note which are annual; those have renewal leverage.

When the table's done, add a total row. Look at the monthly number, then multiply by 12. That annual figure is usually the moment the audit becomes motivating.

Minutes 45–60: Tag the problems

Go down the list and flag each row:

• 🟥 Cut — you can't name why you pay for it, or it's clearly dead.
• 🟨 Renewal review — annual tool renewing in the next 60 days.
• 🟦 Duplicate — overlaps with another tool (two design tools, three AI writers, two project trackers).
• ❓ Unknown owner — nobody knows who bought it or if it's still used.

Duplicates and unknowns are where founders find the fastest wins. If you're paying for both Linear and Asana, or Cursor and Copilot and a third AI tool, one of them is probably cuttable.

Minutes 60–75: Make the easy decisions now

Don't save the decisions for "later" — later is how zombie spend survives. While you're here:

• Cancel the 🟥 tools you're certain about. Send the cancellation emails or start the flows now. (Budget a few minutes — vendors make this harder than it should be.)
• Calendar every 🟨 renewal with a reminder 30 days out, so you decide with leverage instead of after the charge.
• Assign an owner to every ❓ tool. Message the likely owner: "Do we still need tool? You're now the owner — can you confirm it's used and own the renewal?"

Minutes 75–90: Build the prioritized cut list

For everything you couldn't decide on the spot, rank by a simple formula: annual cost × uncertainty. A $3,000/year tool nobody can vouch for outranks a $120/year tool you're 80% sure about. Write the top 5 as a cut list with a decision owner and a date next to each.

That's the audit. In 90 minutes you've gone from invisible spend to a real inventory, a few cancellations done, renewals calendared, owners assigned, and a ranked list of what to investigate next.

What the 90-minute audit can't do

It's a snapshot, and snapshots decay. Within a couple of months, new trials convert, seats get added, and a renewal you didn't catch processes. It also only catches what reached the inboxes and cards you checked — a tool on a former employee's account or paid through a channel you don't see stays invisible.

That decay is the case for making discovery continuous rather than annual. InvoiceAgent runs the email side of this audit on an ongoing basis — scanning billing signals in your connected inbox to keep the inventory current, flag trial conversions and forgotten tools, and surface renewals before they hit. The 90-minute audit is the perfect way to start; a continuous scan is what stops you from needing to redo it from scratch every quarter.

Just run it once

The hardest part of a SaaS audit is starting, because it feels open-ended. Time-boxing removes that excuse. Ninety minutes, one timer, a billing inbox, and a spreadsheet. You'll end with a clearer picture of your spend than most companies ten times your size — and probably a few cancellation emails already sent.