written by: Erkin Koichumanov
Most recurring software bills are not a flat fee. They are a number multiplied by something you own or employ: seats, users, devices, mailboxes, locations, vehicles. It is that multiplier that causes the drift.
Your business changes every month. People leave, laptops get replaced, a site closes, a contractor finishes a project. But none of that reaches the subscription, because nothing in the billing cycle is connected to the thing being counted.
The count only moves one way
Adding a seat takes about twenty seconds. You click a button in the admin console, the charge appears on the next invoice, and oftentimes, nobody needs to approve anything.
However, removing one is a different job. Depending on the vendor, it may require a support ticket, a contract amendment, or a conversation with an account manager who would rather not have it. Worse, some plans will not let you reduce mid-term at all.
The two directions are not equally hard, and the easy one is the one that costs.
A replacement is not a reduction
Usually, when someone leaves, someone else is hired. The new person gets an account on their first day, because that is urgent. The old account gets deactivated whenever somebody remembers, and deactivated is often not the same as unlicensed.
Hardware works the same way. A broken laptop is replaced the same afternoon. But releasing the license attached to the old one? That is a separate task, in a separate system, that nobody has scheduled.
Nobody owns the number
In most businesses three people hold three different versions of it. Your operations lead knows who is actually working. Whoever handles the books sees the invoice. The vendor’s console has a seat count that matches neither.
A wrong number here does not break anything. No alert fires, no service stops, and the invoice looks exactly like last month’s. That is why it survives for years.
Minimum commitments teach everyone to stop asking
If a contract cannot be reduced until renewal, your team learns that raising it is pointless. Then after a while, they stop raising it, even on contracts where the answer would have been yes.
This is worth separating out, because it is the one cause that is genuinely not anybody’s fault inside your business.
What a reconciliation actually looks like
It takes an afternoon, once a year, and it goes like this.
- Pick one subscription, the most expensive per-unit one you have.
- Get a list of what the vendor is billing you for, with the renewal date and any minimum term beside it. TrackMySubs is a great tool to help do this.
- Get an authoritative list of the real thing being counted. For seats, your HR list or identity provider. For devices, whatever system they check in to. Not a spreadsheet somebody maintains by hand.
- Decide in advance what counts as active. No login for ninety days is not active, whatever the list says. Write the threshold down so next year’s count is comparable.
- Match the two lists on something stable, like an employee record or a serial number. Names get reused and will give you a clean-looking answer that is wrong.
- Repeat for the next subscription.
Doing this across every tool at once is how it never gets done. One line item at a time is how it gets done.
The gap runs in both directions
Most people start this expecting to find things they are overpaying for, and they do. They also tend to find the opposite: software in daily use that nobody is licensed for.
That second half is not a billing problem, it is an exposure. It is also the better reason to repeat the exercise every year, because it is the half that gets expensive without warning.
Put it in writing or it happens once
A reconciliation that lives in somebody’s good intentions happens exactly one time. Three lines in a document are enough to change that:
- A date, tied to your largest renewal and sitting sixty days before it, not a month after.
- A named person for each half of the data, because “we will review this annually” with nobody attached is the clause that never happens.
- A rule that the old licence is released in the same task that creates the new one.
The part that fails is never the counting. It is getting the counting onto somebody’s calendar, which is the argument for writing it down rather than agreeing it would be sensible.
Volume is what makes this hard. One subscription is easy to watch, and subscription fatigue sets in somewhere around the fifteenth. The point of tracking them in one place is not tidiness, it is that the per-unit ones quietly stop matching reality and nothing tells you.
Make subscription reviews part of the routine
Per-seat, per-location, and per-device subscriptions are easy to overlook because the charges rarely change dramatically from one month to the next. But small discrepancies add up, especially when they go unnoticed for months or years. A regular review helps you keep your software costs aligned with the way your business actually operates, avoid paying for access you no longer need, and catch gaps before they become bigger problems. The goal isn’t just to cut expenses. It’s to make sure you’re getting value from every subscription you pay for.
Author bio
Erkin Koichumanov is Marketing Manager at Headwind MDM. He spends his working life on one side of this ledger and has the invoices to prove it.