$842 a month to $113 a month, and nobody lost a single feature

This is the least glamorous thing I do and it's frequently the first thing that pays for the whole engagement.

I go through everything a business is paying for monthly. Every subscription, every seat, every auto-renewing thing sitting on a credit card. Then I ask three questions about each one, and a surprising amount of it doesn't survive.

The best result so far took a monthly software bill from $842 to $113, and here's the part I want you to hear clearly: nothing was lost. Nobody gave up a tool they used. Nobody changed how they worked. That wasn't belt-tightening, it was cleanup.

How it gets that bad without anyone being careless

It's never once been because somebody was sloppy with money. These are people who know what a bag of grout costs. It happens structurally, and it happens the same way every time.

• Something got trialled and never cancelled. Somebody signed up to test a scheduling tool two years ago. It didn't get adopted. Nobody cancelled it, because cancelling requires remembering it exists.
• A tool got replaced but not turned off. You moved to a new system. The old one kept billing quietly in the background for a year and a half, because the migration was chaotic and nobody circled back.
• You're paying for seats that belong to people who left. This one is close to universal. Per-user pricing means every departure nobody tidied up becomes a permanent monthly tax.
• Two tools do the same job. Different people in the business picked different favourites and you're funding both. Very common with anything involving file storage, scheduling, or e-signatures.
• The annual-versus-monthly thing. Paying month-to-month, at a premium, on tools you've now used for four straight years, because signing up monthly felt safer at the time and nobody revisited it.
• And now, AI subscriptions. This is the newest layer and it's growing fast. Everybody signed up for everything over the last two years. I keep finding several AI tools on one account where exactly one of them gets opened on any given day.

The three questions

For each line item, in order:

That's it. That's the whole method. I'm giving it away because I'd genuinely rather you go do this yourself on a Sunday afternoon and keep the money than pay me to find it for you.

The thirty-minute version, if you want to do it now

Open the last three months of your business credit card and bank statements. Highlight every recurring charge. Every single one, including the small ones, because the $12 a month things are where the fossils hide.

Put them in a list with what each one is for. Do it by hand; this is the part where you'll go "wait, what is that?" and that reaction is the entire point.

Then run the three questions down the list.

Then, and this is the step people skip, actually cancel them. Same day. Not "I'll get to it." I have watched people find hundreds of dollars a month of dead weight, feel great about it, and still be paying for every bit of it months later, because cancelling a subscription is designed to be irritating.

What to do with the money

Here's the part I actually care about.

When somebody finds a few hundred dollars a month, the instinct is to feel briefly good and then let it dissolve into the general account, where it stops existing as a distinct thing.

Please don't. Point it at something specific. That's a part-time bookkeeper. That's a real website. That's the thing you've been telling yourself you can't afford this year. You went looking for it deliberately, so spend it deliberately.

Why this is usually where I start

Two reasons, and I'll be honest about both.

The first is that it works, and it works quickly. Days, not months, and the money is real.

The second is a trust thing. When somebody hires me they're usually braced for the consultant experience: the strategic framework, the transformation roadmap, the invoice full of confident nouns. Opening with "let's go cancel your dead subscriptions" is a different move, and it tells you something about how the rest of it is going to go.

Once someone's watched you find eight thousand dollars a year by doing something boring and specific, they tend to believe you when you say the interesting stuff is hiding in their invoices too. And it usually is.

— Claire