Are you overpaying for your business software? A 10-minute check
Most small businesses buy software the same way: someone needs a tool, someone puts it on a card, and the subscription renews quietly every month for years. Nobody is being careless. It is simply that software is bought one seat at a time and never looked at as a whole.
When we review a client’s software spend, the same four things come up almost every time. None of them needs a consultant to find. They need ten minutes and a bank statement.
1. You are paying list price
Software vendors sell through partners at lower rates than they charge on their own websites. A business buying directly pays the published price; the same licence bought through an authorised reseller can cost less, with the same product, the same support from the vendor and the same account. Nothing changes for your users, because nothing about the product changes. What changes is who invoices you.
The saving is usually modest per seat, but it applies to every seat, every month, for as long as you use the product. On a team of fifteen using four or five common business tools, it is typically a few hundred dollars a year without anyone giving anything up.
2. You are paying for people who have left
Former staff are the most common source of waste, and the easiest to fix. Their accounts were never removed, or were suspended but still billed, or were kept “just in case” and forgotten. Across a year, three forgotten seats on a mid-tier plan add up to real money, and the problem compounds because every departure adds another.
The fix is a habit rather than a tool: licences come off on the leaver’s last day, as part of the same checklist that collects the laptop and the keys. If nobody owns that checklist, nobody does it.
3. You are on the wrong tier
Plans are usually chosen when a company is smaller or has different needs, then never revisited. Some teams pay for a premium tier because one person once needed one feature; others are on a basic plan and missing a security feature they assumed they had, which is the more expensive mistake in the long run.
Tiers also drift. Vendors rename plans, move features between them and raise prices on the tier you happen to be on. A plan that was right two years ago may now be either more than you need or quietly less than you think.
4. You are paying for the same thing twice
Overlap is common: two file-sharing services, two video-meeting tools, a password manager some staff use and others ignore, a project tracker that duplicates what your email suite already includes. Each subscription looks small on its own. Together they are a second payroll line nobody approved.
Overlap usually comes from teams solving their own problems independently, which is reasonable behaviour. It just needs someone to look across the whole business once a year and consolidate.
The 10-minute check
Open your card and bank statements for the last three months and list every recurring software charge. Include the ones billed annually; they are the easiest to miss. For each one, write down:
- what it is for, and who uses it
- how many seats you pay for, against how many people actually use it
- which plan or tier you are on, and when it renews
- whether another tool you already pay for does the same job
- whether you buy it direct or through a partner
That list alone usually finds something. The most common first finding is a seat count that is wrong by two or three; the second is a product that two different departments are both paying for.
What to do with what you find
Remove the seats that belong to people who have left this week; that is pure saving with no decision to make. Put a note in the calendar a month before each renewal so the tier question gets asked while there is still time to change it. For the overlaps, pick one tool and give the other a retirement date, with someone named to move the data.
Then look at the direct-versus-partner column. For the products that are available through a reseller, ask for a quote. A good partner will tell you plainly when buying direct is the better deal, which happens, and will put everything they do supply on a single invoice so there is one renewal calendar instead of nine.
Where we come in
Busch Technologies licenses business software at partner rates and puts it on one invoice alongside the rest of your IT, with a seat count somebody is actually watching. For several common tools you can see an instant estimate of what you would save on our software savings page. For others we give you a written quote, usually the same day. There is no obligation, and if you are already paying a fair price we will tell you so.