Azure Cost Creep: A FinOps Starter Guide for Melbourne SMEs

Azure costs for Melbourne SMEs grow 30 to 50% a year without anyone noticing. Enterprise FinOps assumes a $5 million cloud spend; this is the SME version, sized for the $50k to $500k reality. Eight quick wins, governance guardrails that stick, and the three traps that catch almost every business.

Why SME Azure spend creeps

It is rarely one decision. A pilot tenant becomes a production tenant. A test virtual machine becomes a forgotten orphan with a 1 TB premium SSD attached. Defender for Cloud gets enabled on a free trial, ends up on the Standard tier across every subscription, and nobody can find the off switch by the time the invoice arrives. The dev environment that was ‘just for two weeks’ is still running 18 months later because no one wants to be the person who turned it off.

We see the same pattern across our managed clients. A business signs up for Azure at $3,000 a month. Two years later it is $11,000 a month, the workloads have not materially expanded, and the CFO is asking the right question for the first time. By then the answer is harder than it would have been at $4,000.

FinOps as a published discipline (the FinOps Foundation maintains the framework, Microsoft has published its own opinionated version) assumes you have a cloud platform team, a financial analyst, and an executive sponsor. For a 60-staff Melbourne business with a quarter-million-dollar Azure footprint, that is overkill. The lite version below takes the parts of FinOps that apply at SME scale and ignores the rest. We run this across professional services, manufacturers and not-for-profits as part of our Melbourne cloud services work.

What ‘normal’ SME Azure spend looks like

Some benchmarks from our managed book, useful as sanity checks on whether your number is in the right zone.

If your number is materially above the band for your profile, there is almost certainly waste. If your number is materially below, either you are doing something genuinely clever or you have under-provisioned somewhere that will cause a production incident later.

The eight quick wins

Most SMEs can take 20 to 35% off their Azure bill in a fortnight of focused work, without changing anything about what the business does. The targets in order of effort-to-saving ratio:

1. Rightsize the virtual machines

The Azure Advisor and the Azure Migrate tools both flag VMs running well below their provisioned capacity. The reality is most SMEs have two or three D8s_v5 instances that were sized off a panicked guess at the start of a migration and have been running at 8% CPU ever since. Moving them down two or three sizes typically saves 60 to 75% of the per-VM cost. Validate with seven days of metrics first; do not just take Advisor’s word for it.

A classic example: a 55-staff engineering consultancy running its file server VM as a D16s_v5 because the original migration consultant ‘matched the on-prem CPU count’, when seven days of metrics show 4% average CPU. Rightsizing to a D2s_v5 saved $720 a month with zero user-visible impact.

2. Kill the orphaned disks

Every time someone deletes a VM through the portal, the OS disk and any data disks survive unless deletion was explicitly chosen. Over a few years, an SME tenant will accumulate 20 to 60 orphaned managed disks, often premium SSDs at $0.15 per GB-month. A 1 TB orphaned premium disk is $150 a month for storing absolutely nothing useful.

Run a quick KQL query in Azure Resource Graph to find disks where ManagedBy is empty. Validate that none of them are being held intentionally (some teams keep a disk for a few months as a ‘soft delete’ before truly removing it), then delete the rest. Easy win, usually $400 to $1,200 a month.

3. Reserved instances or savings plans for the steady-state workloads

Anything that runs 24/7 in steady state – production servers, domain controllers, a SQL VM, a file server – is paying full pay-as-you-go pricing by default. A one-year Reserved Instance is roughly 30% cheaper; three years is closer to 50%. The Azure Savings Plan for compute is more flexible (it covers any VM family in any region for the commitment amount) but a slightly lower discount.

The decision rule we use: if the workload is going to run for at least the next 12 months as-is, take the one-year reservation. If it might move, resize, or change family within that window, take the savings plan. Three-year commitments only for genuinely static workloads.

4. Auto-shutdown for dev and test

Dev and test VMs do not need to run on weeknights or weekends. A standard Azure Automation runbook or the built-in Azure DevTest Labs auto-shutdown can cut a non-production VM bill by 65 to 75%. The cost is two hours of configuration and a 30-second wake-up delay when someone needs the box at 7am Monday. We have yet to meet a dev team that genuinely objected once the saving was shown.

5. Azure Hybrid Benefit

If you have Windows Server or SQL Server licences with active Software Assurance, the Azure Hybrid Benefit lets you bring those licences to Azure VMs and stop paying the per-hour Windows or SQL surcharge. The saving on a Windows Server VM is typically 40%; on a SQL VM it can be 60 to 75%. Almost every SME with Software Assurance is leaving this on the table because nobody enabled the toggle at deployment.

Check your existing fleet through Cost Management. Filter by ‘Windows’ or ‘SQL Server’ as a meter category. Anything not marked as Azure Hybrid Benefit is overpaying.

6. Archive cold storage

Storage account blobs default to the Hot tier. Anything older than 30 days that you have not touched should be in Cool ($0.0152 per GB-month versus $0.0184 for Hot) or, for compliance archives, the Archive tier ($0.00099 per GB-month). Lifecycle policies on the storage account do this automatically.

For a healthcare business with a 14 TB compliance archive, moving the long-tail blobs from Hot to Archive saves in the order of $230 a month. A small number per month but a clean, automated saving that compounds as the archive grows.

7. Kill unused public IPs

A standard static public IP is roughly $4.50 a month. Trivial individually, but most SMEs have 15 to 40 of them, half of which are unattached from their original VM or load balancer. Run an Azure Resource Graph query for public IPs with no associated resource, validate, delete.

8. Review egress

Outbound data transfer (egress) from Azure to the internet is roughly $0.087 per GB after the first 100 GB free per month. Backup tools that pull data out of Azure, a misconfigured replication target that goes through public endpoints rather than peering, a video conferencing recording archive that streams out to a local NAS – all of these can quietly produce $400 to $1,500 a month in egress charges that nobody knows about.

The fix is usually a routing change (route the traffic through a private endpoint or service endpoint) or a topology change (move the target into Azure rather than pulling the data out). The win is identifying the source first; Cost Management broken down by Meter Subcategory shows you where the egress lives.

The governance guardrails that actually stick

Quick wins are easy. Stopping the spend from creeping back up over the next 12 months is the hard part. The lightweight controls we recommend for SMEs – the parts of the textbook that work at this scale:

Subscription-level budgets and alerts

One budget per subscription, set to the monthly run rate plus 15%, with alerts at 80%, 100%, and 120%. The alerts should go to a real person (the CFO and the IT lead), not a shared mailbox. The 80% alert is the one that catches the problem before it becomes a quarterly variance discussion.

Do not bother with budgets at the resource group level for an SME; the maintenance overhead is not worth the precision. The subscription is the right granularity.

Tagging that the team will actually do

Enterprise FinOps documents will tell you to enforce 14 mandatory tags. The team will rebel. For SME purposes, three tags are enough: Environment (Prod / Dev / Test), CostCentre (or Department), and Owner (a person, not a generic mailbox). Enforce them with Azure Policy at subscription creation time so any new resource without the three tags is blocked.

Three tags get used. Fourteen tags get ignored, and then nothing gets used.

Quarterly cost review

One hour every three months. The IT lead and the CFO sit down with Cost Management, look at the trend, look at the top ten cost drivers, look at the variance against budget, and decide whether to act. That is the entire process. The output is a one-page note for the leadership team and a list of remediation actions for the next quarter.

This is the rhythm we run with our managed clients. It is also the rhythm where most of the savings actually surface, because it forces someone to look at the data on a cadence that catches problems while they are small.

The three traps

Three patterns catch almost every SME on Azure. Worth understanding them before they catch you.

Trap 1: Lift-and-shift over-provisioning

The most expensive single mistake we see. A business migrates 12 servers from VMware to Azure and tells the migration partner to ‘match the existing VM sizes.’ The existing on-premises VMs were sized for peak load that occurs maybe twice a year, on hardware that was bought five years ago. The Azure VMs run hot for two hours a quarter and idle the other 99% of the time, but are billed at peak capacity every hour. Add up across 12 VMs and you are paying three times what the workload needs.

The fix is to size for Azure metrics, not on-prem habits. Migrate first, then watch the metrics for two to four weeks, then rightsize aggressively. We have done this exercise often enough now that we build the rightsizing step into the migration plan from the start. If the migration partner does not include a post-migration optimisation phase, that is a warning sign.

Trap 2: The dev environment that became production

A developer or contractor spins up a dev environment to test a workload. The business comes to rely on it. Three years later it is processing real production data on a ‘temporary’ subscription with no monitoring, no backup, no DR, and no reserved instances. It is also costing twice what it should because no one ever optimised it.

The fix is governance at the subscription creation step. No new subscription without a documented owner and an explicit lifecycle (this is a permanent prod subscription, or this is a 90-day project subscription with an automatic shutdown date). Cleaning up after the fact is harder than preventing it.

Trap 3: Defender for Cloud tier sprawl

Defender for Cloud is genuinely good, and the Standard tier offerings (Defender for Servers, Defender for SQL, Defender for Storage, Defender for Containers, Defender for App Service, and so on) protect real attack surfaces. The trap is that they bill per resource and the tiers are enabled per subscription. Click the wrong toggle and you have Defender for Servers Plan 2 running on every VM across every subscription for $24 each per month.

We have seen SMEs paying $4,000 a month for Defender coverage when their actual security need would be served by $800 of targeted enablement. The fix is to choose the plans deliberately, enable per subscription, and review quarterly. Defender for Servers Plan 2 on the workloads that need it; off everywhere else. Defender for Storage on accounts with sensitive data; off on the public assets bucket. The protections matter; the indiscriminate enablement does not.

For the security-side conversation about what to leave on, our Melbourne cyber security services page outlines the decisions we apply on the managed side. Cost and security are the same conversation in Azure; you cannot optimise one without involving the other.

What the FinOps tooling landscape looks like for SMEs

The third-party FinOps tools (CloudHealth, Cloudability, Apptio Cloudability, Flexera) are excellent but enterprise-priced. For an SME at $50k to $500k annual Azure spend, the native Azure tooling is enough:

If your spend grows past $1 million a year, the third-party tools become defensible. Below that, the native tooling is fine and the discipline matters more than the platform.

A small-business worked example

Take an illustrative 65-staff manufacturing business with an Azure bill of $14,800 per month and a CFO who cannot get a straight answer about why. Two weeks of focused work:

• Rightsized seven over-provisioned VMs, saving $2,100 per month
• Deleted 23 orphaned premium disks, saving $1,400 per month
• Applied Azure Hybrid Benefit to 12 Windows VMs (they had Software Assurance through their CSP and no one had enabled the toggle), saving $1,800 per month
• Switched the steady-state production workloads to one-year savings plans, saving $1,200 per month
• Set up auto-shutdown on the dev and test environments, saving $600 per month
• Identified and re-routed an egress problem through a private endpoint, saving $400 per month
• Trimmed Defender for Cloud tier coverage to the workloads that actually needed Plan 2, saving $700 per month

Total monthly saving: $8,200, or about 55% of the original bill. The new run rate of $6,600 per month is a defensible number for the workload, with no production impact and no reduction in security posture (in fact a more deliberate one). Subscription budgets, three-tag enforcement, and quarterly review cadence are now in place. The job took us about 70 hours across two engineers from our 13-strong Melbourne team and was delivered alongside the regular per-user fixed monthly managed IT engagement.

FinOps and the broader cloud strategy

Cost optimisation is one strand of a wider conversation about whether the cloud architecture is right for the business. Sometimes the answer to a high bill is to optimise; sometimes it is to redesign. A 24/7 SQL workload that processes a fixed batch overnight may be better suited to Azure SQL serverless or even a scheduled VM. A file server that nobody touches for three months at a time might belong in Azure Files cool tier with a small AVD presence on demand. These are not quick wins; they are architecture changes. But once the quick wins are taken, the conversation moves to design.

For Melbourne SMEs that want a second opinion on whether the architecture is right before committing to another year of the existing spend, we run cloud architecture reviews as a discrete piece of work, separate from ongoing managed services. They are useful at the 12-month mark of any non-trivial Azure deployment. Reach us through the contact page if that is the conversation you need.

Frequently Asked Questions

Should we move away from Azure to save money?

Almost never the right answer for a workload that is already in Azure. Egress fees on a full re-platform are punishing, the operational disruption is real, and the cost difference between Azure, AWS and GCP for SME-typical workloads is usually under 15% once both are properly optimised. Optimise what you have before considering a move. The exception is a workload that genuinely fits a different platform’s primitives better (a heavy GCP BigQuery analytics workload, for example).

How often should we revisit our reserved instance commitments?

At the renewal point and at any major workload change. The Azure Savings Plan is more flexible than the older Reserved Instances because it does not lock you to a VM family; if your workloads shift, the savings plan keeps applying. We typically recommend a mix: reservations for the most stable workloads (domain controllers, file servers, the SQL VM that has run unchanged for three years), savings plans for the rest.

What does FinOps mean for our cloud backup and DR spend?

Backup storage tends to live outside the day-to-day cost conversation and grows quietly. Same principles apply: tier the storage (most backup data can live in cool or archive after 30 days), review retention against actual recovery needs, and watch the egress when you do a restore. Our companion piece on backup and disaster recovery for Melbourne businesses goes deeper on the design decisions.

Do we need a dedicated FinOps person?

Not at SME scale. The work is two to four hours a month for an experienced engineer plus a quarterly review with the CFO. We run it as part of the managed engagement for clients on our per-user fixed monthly pricing model. Hiring a dedicated FinOps person is a sensible move at around $2 to $3 million annual cloud spend, not before.

Will the optimisation work introduce risk to production?

It can if it is done carelessly. The discipline is: validate against metrics before any resize, take a backup before any storage change, do the work in a maintenance window, and have a rollback path. Done carefully this does not cause production incidents, but the process matters. A weekend cowboy resize of a production SQL VM is how you cause an incident.

What is the role of the CFO in cloud cost management?

The CFO owns the budget and the variance conversation; the IT lead and the MSP own the technical optimisation. The quarterly review is the meeting where those two functions talk to each other. Most SME cost creep we see comes from a lack of that conversation rather than from any technical failure.

If you cannot tell us in 30 seconds how many SaaS subscriptions your business pays for, you have SaaS sprawl. For a typical sub-$10M Australian SME, 5% to 12% of recurring SaaS spend is duplicated, unused, or forgotten. This post walks through a four-step audit you can finish before EOFY.

Why SaaS sprawl is a financial problem, not just an IT one

This is a deliberately financial post. We have a separate piece coming on Shadow IT, which covers the security angle. The audit process below is the one we run when a CFO calls us in May or June and says some version of: “I think we are paying for too much software and I do not really know what we have.” That conversation has happened more times this year than in the previous three combined, and EOFY is the moment to fix it because every subscription you cancel before 30 June reduces your run-rate cost for FY27.

SaaS sprawl is not a security incident, it is a slow leak. It happens because individual product subscriptions are small enough to fall under the discretionary spend threshold of most managers ($50 to $200 a month on a credit card), and big enough collectively to fund another two staff members. For an illustrative 48-staff professional services firm with around $7.5M revenue, a SaaS bill of $186,000 a year is entirely plausible. After audit, we cut it to $142,000 without removing any meaningful capability. That is one and a half graduate salaries, sitting in software nobody used.

We run this exercise inside our managed IT engagements and as standalone projects. The methodology has stabilised into a four-step process that works for any SME with bookkeeping in Xero or MYOB and an executive willing to make some decisions.

Step 1: Extract the spend data

The first step sounds easy and is usually the hardest. You need a clean, single-source list of every recurring software charge the business has paid for in the last 12 months. Not what the IT register says you have. What the bank account and the credit card statements prove you have.

Pulling data from Xero

For Xero-based businesses, the export workflow is:

1. Go to Accounting, Reports, Account Transactions
2. Set the date range to the last 13 months (you want one full year plus the current month for renewal visibility)
3. Filter by the expense accounts you typically book software to: usually ‘Software Subscriptions’, ‘IT Expenses’, ‘Computer Software’, ‘Cloud Services’, and sometimes ‘Marketing’ for tools that snuck in via that team
4. Export as CSV

You also need the credit card transaction export, separately, because half the rogue subscriptions are on staff cards and never get coded to a software account. Pull the last 13 months of card statements and grep for any merchant name that looks like a SaaS vendor.

Pulling data from MYOB

For MYOB Business or AccountRight users, the workflow is similar: Reports, Accounts, Find Transactions, filter by account, export to Excel. The chart of accounts in MYOB tends to be messier than Xero in our experience, so you will want to also pull the All Journals report for the period and search the description column for known SaaS vendor names.

The Microsoft 365 admin centre and Google Workspace

Do not forget the platform you are already on. Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace both have a billing section showing all subscriptions, seat counts, and the per-seat price. Pull that as a separate dataset. You will use it later when you check seat utilisation against headcount.

At the end of step 1, you should have a single spreadsheet with columns for: vendor name, total annual spend, monthly spend (if recurring), billing frequency, payment method, charge account, and a blank column for ‘function’ which we fill in next.

Step 2: Deduplicate by function

This is where the audit gets interesting. Most SMEs do not think they have duplicate tools. Almost all of them do. The trick is to categorise every tool by the job it does, and then look for jobs being done twice.

Use a six-category matrix:

For each line in your spreadsheet from step 1, assign a category. Then sort by category and look for duplicates within each category. The patterns we find most often:

• Three project management tools, because each department picked their own and never standardised
• Two e-signature platforms (DocuSign for legal, Adobe Sign because it came in Acrobat Pro)
• Paid Zoom Pro alongside Teams Phone, when nobody actually needs Zoom anymore
• An old CRM still being paid for after the team migrated to a new one 18 months ago
• Multiple file-sharing tools (Dropbox, OneDrive, Google Drive, Box) because different teams brought in different ones
• Two password managers, one of which has six active users out of 40 seats paid

The team in our audit example that kept paying for Trello two years after moving to ClickUp is not an exaggeration. The Trello bill was $18 a user per month for 12 seats, $2,592 a year, billed to the credit card of a manager who left in 2024. Nobody had thought to cancel it because nobody had thought about it at all.

Step 3: Map each tool to a business owner

For every line in your now-deduplicated list, you need a named human who owns the decision to keep, kill, or consolidate. This is the step that breaks the audit at most SMEs, because nobody wants to own a tool nobody uses, and nobody wants to admit they signed up for the thing in the first place.

The ownership conversation

Run this as a structured exercise, not an email thread. Get the leadership team in a room with the spreadsheet on a screen. For each line, the question is: “Who is the business owner of this tool?” If nobody puts their hand up, that is the strongest possible signal that the tool should be killed.

Owners need two responsibilities clearly stated:

• They authorise the spend
• They are accountable for whether the business gets value from the tool

For tools that survive ownership assignment, you also want a documented use case (“we use Asana for client project tracking across the consulting team, 18 users”) and a renewal date.

Seat utilisation check

For every tool the business is keeping, pull the actual seat utilisation in the last 30 days. Most SaaS vendors have a ‘last active’ or ‘last login’ field in the admin console. Compare paid seats to actively used seats.

A creative agency with 38 Adobe Creative Cloud licences for 24 people is the classic case. The previous office manager had set up seats for every staff member because Adobe ran a promotion in 2022. Of the 38 seats, 19 had been used in the prior 90 days. Cutting back to 25 seats (24 plus one buffer) saved $11,800 a year. They had been paying $880 a month for unused creative software for 18 months.

Step 4: Kill, consolidate, keep

The final step is the decision. Every tool in your spreadsheet ends up in one of three buckets.

Kill

Tools with no owner, no use case, or zero seat utilisation. Cancel them before the next renewal. For tools billed monthly, the cancellation is easy. For tools on annual contracts, mark the renewal date in the calendar and set a reminder for 60 days prior.

Watch for cancellation friction. Some SaaS vendors require you to call a sales rep to cancel, especially on enterprise tiers. Budget time for this. Some require 30 or 60 days notice. Read the terms before you assume you can cancel today.

Consolidate

Two tools doing the same job, both with active users. The owner of each tool needs to pick one and migrate. Set a realistic migration timeline (usually 60 to 90 days for a project management tool migration; longer for a CRM) and a hard cancellation date for the loser.

Migration is the step where consolidation projects die. Account for the cost: someone needs to actually do the work, and the loser tool needs to stay paid until the migration completes. Build that into the savings calculation.

Keep

Tools with a clear owner, an active use case, and reasonable seat utilisation. For these, the audit work is rightsizing the seat count and aligning the billing frequency. Annual billing is usually 10% to 20% cheaper than monthly. If you are confident in the keep decision, switch to annual at renewal.

Typical wins for a sub-$10M SME

For Australian SMEs in the $2M to $10M revenue band, we consistently see SaaS audit savings of 5% to 12% of total SaaS spend. The mix typically breaks down like this:

For an illustrative 32-staff software business with $4.8M revenue and $94,000 of annual SaaS spend pre-audit, the savings might break down as $11,200 from killing unused tools, $9,800 from consolidating overlapping tools, $6,400 from rightsizing seats, and $2,100 from billing switches. Total $29,500 a year, 31% reduction. The audit itself took about 14 hours of staff time across three weeks.

The Excel template

The template we use internally has six tabs. You can build your own in an afternoon:

1. Raw data: CSV exports from Xero or MYOB, pasted as-is, one tab per source
2. Consolidated list: deduplicated by vendor, with annual spend, monthly spend, billing frequency, category, owner, use case, and decision (kill/consolidate/keep) columns
3. Seat utilisation: for each kept tool, the paid seats vs active seats vs target seats
4. Renewal calendar: all renewal dates in date order, colour-coded by criticality
5. Savings tracker: per-decision annualised saving, with a running total
6. Action log: what we cancelled, when, what we consolidated, and the realisation date for each saving

The most important tab is the action log. Audits are easy. Execution is hard. Without a tracked action log, half the decisions never get implemented and the savings never land.

Common mistakes during SaaS audits

Not including microservices and add-ons

Many tools are sold as the base product plus per-feature add-ons. HubSpot, Salesforce, Microsoft 365, Adobe Creative Cloud, all have premium add-ons that are often turned on by accident or for a one-off campaign and never turned off. Audit add-ons separately, not just the base product.

Ignoring the implicit licence inside another product

This is the biggest miss. If you are paying for Microsoft 365 Business Premium at $33 per user per month, you already have Teams (voice optional), SharePoint, OneDrive, Exchange, Intune, Defender for Office 365, Azure AD Premium P1, and Power Automate Free. If you are also paying for Slack, Dropbox, a separate identity provider, or a third-party MDM, you are paying twice. Map the included entitlements of your platform tier before assessing the standalone tools.

Forgetting personal credit card subscriptions

If staff expense SaaS through reimbursement, those subscriptions never hit the company card. They live in the expense system. Pull a year of expense claims and search for any vendor name that smells like software.

Treating it as a one-off

SaaS sprawl is a continuous problem. Without a recurring process, you will be back where you started in 18 months. Build a quarterly mini-audit into the finance calendar: every quarter, pull new SaaS charges, check ownership and use case, and add to the central register. This is the kind of governance that comes naturally inside a managed IT services arrangement with per-user fixed monthly pricing, because the MSP has a vested interest in keeping the SaaS register clean.

How this connects to your broader IT environment

A clean SaaS register is a precondition for several other things you probably need to do this year. It feeds directly into your cybersecurity posture, because every SaaS tool is an authentication surface and a data exfiltration risk. It feeds into your Privacy Act compliance, because the 2024 reforms require you to know where personal information lives, and ‘in some SaaS tool nobody can remember the name of’ is no longer acceptable. It also feeds your cloud services strategy, because a deduplicated tool stack is much easier to integrate and govern.

For Essential Eight alignment specifically, the audit is the foundation of the User Application Hardening control. You cannot harden applications you do not know exist.

When to bring in external help

You can run the audit yourself if you have a financially literate operations manager with a few spare hours each week and an executive willing to make decisions. If you do not, or if you suspect the audit will surface uncomfortable conversations about who signed up for what, an external party makes the process faster and less politically charged.

TechAssist runs SaaS audits as a standalone engagement or as part of broader managed IT onboarding. Our team of 13 Melbourne-employed staff includes the people who actually know which Microsoft 365 entitlements overlap with which standalone tools, which matters because most of the consolidation savings hide in that overlap. We run audits out of both our Tecoma office and our Bourke Street CBD office, so we can do the workshop in person wherever your team is. If you want to start a conversation, the EOFY window is the right time.

Frequently Asked Questions

How long does a typical SaaS audit take?

For a 30 to 80-staff SME, plan on 12 to 20 hours of work spread over three weeks. The data extraction is the longest single task. The decisions can be made in two or three workshops if leadership is willing to commit time.

Can we just use a SaaS management platform like Vendr or Zylo?

Those tools are excellent for businesses with 200+ staff and SaaS bills over $500,000. For sub-$10M SMEs, the licence cost of the management tool is often higher than the savings it surfaces. Excel and a focused three-week project produce 90% of the result at 10% of the cost.

Should we cancel everything that has zero use, or migrate users first?

Confirm zero use across at least 90 days before cancelling, and notify the listed billing contact (not just the technical contact) before pulling the plug. Some tools are ‘used’ only at month-end or quarter-end and look dormant at other times. A 90-day window catches most of these.

What about free SaaS tools, do they matter for the audit?

From a cost perspective, no. From a security and governance perspective, very much yes. Free tools are where the data leaks happen. That conversation belongs in the Shadow IT review, not the financial audit.

Do we need to involve our MSP in the audit?

If you have one, yes. Your MSP often holds the admin credentials to half the tools you are auditing, knows the seat utilisation in real time, and can execute the cancellations on your behalf. If you run a co-managed IT arrangement, this is the kind of work that should already be part of your quarterly review with the MSP.

When is the right time of year to run the audit?

April or May, to bank the FY27 savings before 30 June. Cancellations made in May reduce your run-rate for FY27 and improve your EBITDA position before EOFY. Audits run in September or October are still valuable, but you have given up a year of savings.