The first quarter of 2022 is done. Before you plan Q2, spend one hour on a business technology audit. Not a consulting engagement, not a committee, just you, a spreadsheet, and your bank statement.
Here is why it matters: almost every company I work with pays for software nobody uses. Trials that auto-converted, tools a former employee championed, duplicate services doing the same job. On a first-pass business technology audit, most SMEs I have seen find 20 to 30 percent of their tech spend producing nothing.
That is not a rounding error. If you spend Rp 15 juta per month across subscriptions, hosting, and licenses, a typical first audit recovers Rp 3 to 4 juta monthly. That pays for a real improvement somewhere else, or it just stays in your pocket.
Why quarterly, and why one hour
Annual reviews are too slow. A useless subscription discovered in December has already burned eleven months of fees. Quarterly is frequent enough to catch waste early, and rare enough that nobody dreads it.
The one-hour cap is deliberate. If you give this task a full day, it becomes a project, projects get postponed, and postponed projects never happen. One hour forces you to work from evidence you already have: the bank statement and your own memory of what the team actually touches.
You are not evaluating strategy in this hour. You are answering one question per line item: is this earning its keep?
The four-column audit template
Open a spreadsheet. Go through your last three months of bank and credit card statements, plus any invoices from IT vendors. For every technology cost you find, fill four columns:
| Column | What to write |
|---|---|
| Tool | Name of the service or product |
| Monthly cost | Convert annual fees to monthly. Rp 6 juta per year is Rp 500 ribu per month |
| Owner | The one person who uses it most or manages it |
| Breaks-if-cancelled | What actually stops working if you cancel today |
The last column is the whole audit. Be brutally honest. "The team might need it someday" is not something breaking. "Invoicing stops" is something breaking.
Common entries for an Indonesian SME look like this:
- Domain and hosting: Rp 100 to 500 ribu per month
- Business email (Google Workspace or Microsoft 365): Rp 90 to 180 ribu per user per month
- Accounting software: Rp 200 ribu to 1 juta per month
- Design tools, project tools, storage, marketing platforms: this is where the bodies are buried
The three verdicts
Every line gets one of three verdicts. Do not allow a fourth category called "review later." That category is where waste hides.
- Keep. Clear owner, clear breakage if cancelled, cost proportionate to value. Move on.
- Cancel. No owner, or nobody can name what breaks. Cancel it this week, not this quarter. If you are nervous, downgrade to the free tier first and see if anyone notices within 30 days. Usually nobody does.
- Consolidate. Two tools doing the same job. Pick one, migrate, cancel the other. Two project management tools, two cloud storage accounts, three design subscriptions across three staff members. Consolidation often saves more than outright cancellation because these are usually the expensive per-seat products.
A pattern worth watching: tools owned by people who left. When someone resigns, their subscriptions rarely resign with them. I audited a distribution company last year that was still paying for a marketing automation platform championed by a manager who left in 2019. Nobody had logged in for 18 months. That was Rp 2,4 juta per month, or almost Rp 29 juta per year, for nothing.
What the audit usually reveals
Beyond the direct savings, the audit surfaces structural problems worth knowing about:
- No ownership records. You discover your domain is registered under a freelancer's personal email, or the hosting login lives only in a former staff member's head. Fix this immediately, before it becomes an emergency. I cover the full checklist in Domain, Hosting, and Email: Own Your Business Basics.
- Shadow IT. Staff paying for tools on personal cards and claiming reimbursement, invisible to any central list. Not malicious, just untracked. Bring these into the official spreadsheet.
- Overprovisioned plans. You bought the 50-user tier when 12 people use it. Downgrading a plan feels less satisfying than cancelling one, but it is often the bigger number.
- Annual renewals nobody approved. Set a calendar reminder 30 days before every annual renewal you decide to keep. Auto-renewal is where vendors make their easiest money.
None of this requires technical skill. It requires an hour and the willingness to say "we do not use this" out loud.
When cutting is not the answer
An audit is not only about cancelling things. Sometimes the honest finding is the opposite: you are underspending on something critical. If your entire business runs on a Rp 30 ribu per month shared hosting plan that goes down twice a month, the audit verdict is "upgrade," not "keep."
The point is intentionality. Every rupiah of tech spend should map to something the business needs, at a level the business needs it. Whether that means spending less or spending better depends on what the spreadsheet shows you. If you find yourself unsure whether a tool serves a real business goal at all, that is usually a sign the tooling grew without a plan, which is a bigger conversation than an audit. I wrote about that in Why Your Business Needs a Technology Strategy, Not Just a Website.
Your one-hour checklist
Here is the whole exercise, compressed:
- Pull three months of statements and vendor invoices (10 minutes).
- List every tech cost with tool, monthly cost, owner, breaks-if-cancelled (25 minutes).
- Assign a verdict to every line: keep, cancel, or consolidate (15 minutes).
- Cancel the obvious ones immediately and set renewal reminders for the keepers (10 minutes).
Then put a recurring event in your calendar for the last week of June, and do it again. The second audit takes 30 minutes because the spreadsheet already exists.
One hour, four columns, three verdicts. Most owners who run this for the first time recover more money than they expected and, more importantly, end the hour actually knowing what their business runs on. That knowledge is worth more than the savings.