When NovaPay's VP of Finance, Rachel Chen, joined the company in early 2025, she inherited a SaaS tracking spreadsheet that listed 63 active software subscriptions totaling approximately $1.79M per year. It had been maintained by an ops coordinator who left six months prior. Nobody had touched it since.
On her first month, Rachel noticed something off: the numbers on the spreadsheet didn't match the actual credit card statements. Not by a little — by a lot. QuickBooks was showing recurring software charges that weren't on the list. Some tools she'd never heard of were appearing regularly. Others on the spreadsheet hadn't been charged in months.
"I asked the head of engineering what Retool was costing us. He said '$300 a month.' It was $4,200 a month. That was the moment I knew we had a serious problem."
— Rachel Chen, VP Finance, NovaPay
NovaPay was preparing for its Series D raise and potential IPO readiness process. Board members were asking increasingly pointed questions about operating efficiency. A $680K gap in software spend visibility wasn't just an operational problem — it was a diligence risk.
Rachel evaluated three platforms before choosing The Spend Shift: a large enterprise tool that required a six-week implementation, a mid-market competitor with an opaque pricing model, and The Spend Shift.
The deciding factor was speed. NovaPay had a board meeting in eight weeks. Rachel needed real numbers — not a beautifully designed platform that would take three months to configure.
When The Spend Shift finished its initial scan, Rachel stared at the screen for a long moment. The platform had found 147 active SaaS subscriptions. Her spreadsheet had listed 63.
The 84 "invisible" subscriptions broke down into three categories:
Tools started by employees who had since left the company. Auto-renewing monthly on corporate cards nobody was reviewing. The oldest had been running for 26 months undetected.
Five separate project management tools. Three different analytics platforms. Two competing CRM systems used by different sales pods. Every duplicate was a failed standardization that Finance had never been told about.
Tools where fewer than 20% of purchased seats were being used in the last 60 days. This included a $96,000/year enterprise security platform where only 4 of 90 licensed users had ever logged in.
Total hidden waste identified: $680,000 per year. On a $1.79M estimated budget, that was 38% of their entire software spend evaporating silently.
Rachel didn't try to fix everything at once. She triaged by impact and execution speed, focusing first on the highest-dollar, lowest-friction cuts.
Rachel sent a Slack message to department heads with a list of tools tied to former employees, asking for 24-hour confirmation of any that were still needed. 28 were cancelled within the week. The remaining 3 were reassigned to active users. Immediate savings: $112,000/year.
Armed with The Spend Shift's usage report showing only 4 active users on a 90-seat security platform, Rachel contacted the vendor. The vendor's initial position was "we can't reduce seats mid-contract." Armed with the data and the threat of non-renewal, they reached an agreement: 20 seats at a renegotiated rate. Savings: $71,000 at next renewal.
The five project management tools (Asana, Monday.com, ClickUp, Notion for tasks, and a custom Jira setup) were costing $187,000/year combined. After a cross-team vote and migration plan, the company standardized on Linear with a company-wide contract — negotiated using consolidated seat count as leverage. Savings: $154,000/year.
The Spend Shift surfaced 14 contracts renewing in the next 90 days totaling $340,000. Rachel worked through each with 60-day advance notice — negotiating 6, cancelling 3, and renewing 5 at existing terms but with formal usage benchmarks written into the contract. A new software procurement policy went company-wide: any new SaaS over $500/month requires Finance approval. Additional savings identified: $343,000/year.
At the board meeting, Rachel presented a slide showing the company's SaaS spend efficiency had improved from $5,774/employee to $3,581/employee — a metric that resonated immediately with board members benchmarking the company against public fintech comps.
"The board asked how we found $680K in savings without cutting any product capabilities. I said: we just stopped paying for things nobody was using. The Spend Shift made that visible for the first time."
— Rachel Chen, VP Finance, NovaPay
NovaPay continues to use The Spend Shift as its system of record for all SaaS spend. In the six months since the initial audit, they've maintained sub-80% seat utilization across all tools and have not approved a single new SaaS purchase that wasn't reviewed against existing stack capabilities first.
NovaPay's result wasn't unusual — it was typical. Here's what drove the outcome:
The 84 subscriptions they didn't know about would never have appeared on a self-reported inventory. Only by scanning actual transaction data did the full picture emerge.
Ghost subscriptions are cancelled in days. Consolidation takes months. By securing quick wins first, Rachel had board-ready numbers before the hard work of standardization was complete.
Vendors cave when you have usage data. "We're only using 4% of our seats" is an argument vendors can't dismiss. Without The Spend Shift's real-time utilization report, that $71K renegotiation doesn't happen.
Without the procurement policy and renewal calendar, the savings would have eroded within 12 months as new shadow IT accumulated. Governance is what turns a one-time cleanup into permanent operational improvement.
The average company our size discovers 30–40% more subscriptions than they knew about. Connect your QuickBooks and SSO and find out in 14 minutes.
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Most companies find 30–50% more subscriptions than they knew about.
How many are hiding in yours?