In meeting with various businesses of all sizes, it has become apparent that most have what I would call a sprawl of SaaS products: more software subscriptions than they really need or can comfortably manage.
Any business of any age, as it grows, tends to increase the number of tools it has at its disposal in order to satisfy niche or narrow applications. Sometimes these products hang around longer than they need to. Sometimes they have well and truly outlived their original purpose. Sometimes they were never properly set up to do what they were supposed to do.
This leaves the business with multiple accounts and licences for online software that is not properly utilised, not properly taken advantage of, and a drain on business finances and user time.
This is not a single individual's fault. A staff member doing their job discovers a product that makes life easier or helps them achieve something they otherwise could not achieve. They submit a purchase order request. It might only be $20 or $50 a month, it gets approved, and the subscription starts.
Over time, they might find it was never exactly what they wanted, but they forget to cancel it or leave it in place because they assume other people are using it. Sometimes the product needed intensive setup, perhaps even a consultant, and that work was never fully done. The product never achieves what it was supposed to achieve.
This becomes compounded when a company signs up for a product such as a CRM that was not properly set up, staff were never fully trained on its use, and it never really was what they needed anyway. You end up with multiple licences, and on enterprise tiers those licences can span months or years, which makes getting out of them much harder.
I have even discovered duplicate subscriptions: someone signs up for something useful, moves on, and the next person signs up for exactly the same thing while an existing product already does it or is already being used.
This also covers the situation where multiple products are doing basically the same thing. A company might use Mailchimp to send mass emails while it already has marketing tools inside its CRM. Then Mailchimp stops being used, someone signs up for Constant Contact, and now there are multiple places where email data exists, multiple accounts being paid for, and no one is really in charge of any of them.
The obvious target in auditing this is the additional cost, but there are other problems. The next most obvious is conflict around source of truth. Any business should have a single location where important information is stored and treated as authoritative. Everything else should rely on that.
When you have multiple accounts doing similar things, or even dissimilar things that still collect similar data, you end up with fragmented data. That is dreadful for any business trying to rely on that data for marketing, AI, reporting, or operations.
Multiple accounts also increase complexity. Staff cannot possibly be properly trained on every platform, so you end up with people half knowing what they are supposed to do. Often one or two people in an organisation know how to use a system, and everyone else goes to them constantly even when it is not really their job.
Multiple accounts, licences, and sign-ons increase the risk of data being lost, either by accident or through malicious means. When a staff member moves roles, is made redundant, or leaves the business, they need to be disconnected from every account they held. That becomes difficult if the accounts are not properly audited or understood.
As we move into the era of agentic AI, accurate, consolidated, non-duplicated data becomes even more important. Agents and AI tools can only provide useful insight or do useful work when the data they read is reliable. If the data is fragmented across scattered platforms, this becomes almost impossible.
So what do you do about it? Start by interviewing your staff and asking what SaaS products they use. You might need to ask what cloud software, online tools, or software subscriptions they use. Get a complete list from everybody.
Get your accountant, CFO, or even an AI tool to go through bank accounts, credit card statements, and other payment records to find out what tools are being used and paid for. Again, make a complete list.
Where possible, find out who the admin is and who is in charge of each piece of software. You might find that it is no one. If so, work out how to get access.
Find out what each piece of software does. Compare functions and features. Is this one needed over that one? Is something else going to do the job better? Has the software been kept up to date and secure?
Where possible, download data and store it for syncing to your source of truth. Turn off every piece of software that has zero use. You might find subscriptions that have existed for years and have never been used.
Remove access and consolidate people onto specific pieces of software that do specific jobs only if they are needed. If required, sign up for the right tools or increase licences where necessary.
Ensure the software that remains has its data going to a single location. I suggest some sort of data lake, CRM, or combination of those where the data can be properly viewed and audited by a responsible person in the organisation.
Then, and only then, can you start using data that is flowing correctly, consolidated, and accurate to create agentic tools or serve other business purposes.
Do not assume anything when you start this audit. Be prepared to be shocked. I hope this helps, and if you would like assistance to get this done, give me a call.
