Software inventory: how to find out what your company pays for, who uses it and what it costs per month

Why nobody has the list of company subscriptions

Ask your finance lead how much the company spends on software each month and they will look at the credit card. Ask whoever handles IT and they will look at the Google console. Ask marketing and they will name Canva and two tools nobody else has heard of. None of them has the full list, and it is not carelessness.

Software gets bought a little at a time. Someone starts a free trial on their own card and the company reimburses it. A sales manager signs up for Zoom for his team on the department card. The person who created the Notion account left a year ago and the charge keeps landing on a card nobody reviews line by line. Every purchase made sense at the time; what never existed was one place to write them all down.

The result is familiar: when the Google Workspace annual renewal comes around, nobody knows how many licenses are really needed. And when someone leaves, nobody knows which tools they had a paid seat in.

The six fields in every row of a software inventory

An app inventory does not need thirty columns. It needs six, filled in for every tool:

• Name and plan: not “Google”, but “Google Workspace Business Standard”. The plan changes the price and the rules for reducing licenses.
• Price and billing period: what each license costs and whether it is billed monthly or yearly. An annual charge that lands in March is forgotten by April.
• Who pays: the company card, a department card, a personal card that gets reimbursed, or a wire transfer against an invoice.
• Owner: the person who decides whether the tool stays, how many licenses it needs and who gets in. If there is no name, the tool has no owner and nobody will ever cut it.
• Licenses bought and used: the ones you pay for and the ones with someone behind them who actually signs in. The difference is money that leaves every month.
• Renewal date: the day the vendor charges the full year again. On most annual plans it is the only date when you can lower the quantity.

Where to get the data in one afternoon

You do not need to interview the whole company. Three sources cover almost everything:

1. The credit card statement. Pull the last 12 months of the company card and filter for software vendors. Twelve months, because annual charges show up only once. Repeat with the personal cards that get reimbursed: that is where the trials nobody canceled live.
2. The Google Workspace admin console. Under Billing you see every Google subscription, its plan, how many licenses you bought and how many are assigned. In each user’s profile, the third-party apps with access to the account show which tools people use with their work email: Slack, Canva, Notion, Figma. Not all of them are paid, but all of them are candidates for the list.
3. Receipt emails. Search “your receipt”, “invoice” and “payment confirmation” in the admin, finance and manager mailboxes. Vendors send an email for every charge, and that email carries the plan, the amount and the date. It is the most complete source for subscriptions that never touch the company card.

That gives you name, price, billing period and who pays. What is missing, owner and licenses used, you get by asking each manager with a short list: “these are your team’s tools, who uses them?”.

The minimum spreadsheet: a 60-person company example

This is what a freshly built software inventory looks like, with rounded example prices. The incomplete rows are not a mistake: they are the list of open questions.

This company pays about $1,300 a month for these five tools. With the table in front of you, three things nobody had seen jump out: Zoom has 6 unused licenses renewing in July, Notion is paid by someone who is gone, and Google has 3 licenses on suspended accounts billed exactly like active ones.

What to do with what shows up. You will usually find three kinds of findings:

• Licenses on suspended accounts: people who left and still hold a paid seat. In Google, suspending is not enough; you have to delete or archive the account. How to do it on each platform is in unused licenses.
• Duplicates: two departments paying for Zoom separately, or Canva and Figma for the same job. Pick one and move everyone onto a single plan.
• Trials nobody canceled: small monthly charges on personal cards, with one or two users. Ask around, and if nobody answers within a week, cancel them.

Controlling software spend without going back to the spreadsheet

The spreadsheet you built today is out of date next month: someone joins, someone leaves, someone signs up for a new tool, Zoom renews. Nobody opens it again because maintaining it is a job with no owner. For the inventory to stay alive, every change has to update it on its own.

That is where Mekovault starts. The Licenses screen reads Google Workspace and shows, per platform, licenses bought, used and sitting on suspended accounts, with what they cost per month and the last date you can reduce them. Subscriptions with no connector (Canva, Notion, Adobe and the rest) are recorded in Software purchases with price, renewal date and owner, and go into the same control. And so you do not start from zero, you import the spreadsheet you built this afternoon: every row gets an owner, an expiration date and a warning 30 days before renewal.

From there, when someone leaves, their seat in every tool is flagged for release. When someone asks for something new, it goes through approval and is on the list from day one. The inventory stops being a chore and becomes the record of what is already happening. If you want to see what you pay today for licenses nobody uses, try the calculator.