Three years of enthusiastic buying — a tool for each new problem, a pilot that quietly became a subscription, an AI feature added at a premium — leaves most marketing teams with a stack nobody fully understands and an invoice nobody has read line by line. The audit that fixes this takes an afternoon and reliably recovers a meaningful amount of budget.
Start from the invoice, not the stack diagram
Pull every recurring charge from finance for the last twelve months, including the ones on someone's personal card. Put them in a spreadsheet with three columns: who owns this, what job does it do, when did someone last log in. In every audit I've run, several rows have no owner, at least one duplicates another tool's core function, and one has been renewing since a person who left eighteen months ago set it up.
The three categories everything falls into
Load-bearing: removing it breaks something visible tomorrow. Genuinely useful: it saves real time and someone would object loudly if it went. Sediment: nobody would notice for a month. Most stacks are roughly a third sediment by cost. Cancelling that third is not a difficult decision once it's written down — the difficulty is entirely in doing the writing.
- Every tool needs a named owner or it gets cancelled by default
- Any tool without a login in ninety days is presumed dead
- Where two tools overlap, pick one and fully migrate rather than running both
- Check the AI add-on you agreed to last year — is anyone actually using it?
Consolidation has a real cost too
The suite that replaces four point solutions is usually worse at each individual job. Sometimes that trade is right — fewer integrations, one invoice, one place for data — and sometimes the best-in-class tool is best-in-class for a reason your team depends on daily. Decide deliberately rather than defaulting to either 'consolidate everything' or 'best tool for every job'. Both are ideologies rather than strategies.
Put a stop on the accumulation
The audit is worthless if the stack regrows. Set a rule: any new tool requires a named owner, a named task it removes, and a review date twelve months out that actually appears in someone's calendar. It's mild bureaucracy and it's the only thing I've seen prevent the same audit being necessary again in two years.
Nobody gets promoted for cancelling software. It remains one of the fastest ways to find budget for something that would actually move the number.
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