Auditing your current firm stack.

Software at small firms accumulates. Someone trialled a thing in 2022, never cancelled. The previous practice manager bought a CRM, nobody adopted it, the renewal still happens. Three different people pay for the same e-signature service on their own personal cards. Total spend: meaningful. Total usage: uneven.

The audit is a one-day exercise. Not a project. By the end of the day you'll know what you have, what it costs, who's actually using it, and the three obvious cuts.

Hour 1: pull the bills

Sources, in order of completeness:

• Bank and credit card statements (last 12 months). Anything recurring under £1,500/month. This catches the shadow subscriptions that aren't in the accounting system because someone's paying on a personal card and claiming it back.
• Accounts package — suppliers list. Anything tagged software, IT, subscriptions, services.
• Direct conversations with each fee-earner and paralegal.“What software do you use weekly? What did you stop using? What do you wish you had?” Five minutes each. You'll find half a dozen tools nobody had on the central list.

Drop everything into a sheet. Use the stack audit templateas a starting point if you don't have one already — columns for tool, owner, monthly cost, annual cost, contract end date, seats bought, seats actually used, purpose.

Hour 2: find the seat-utilisation gap

For each tool, ask the supplier (or check the admin panel) how many seats are bought versus how many are active in the last 30 days. The gap is one of the biggest pools.

Common findings at small firms:

• Practice management: 8 seats bought, 5 active. Three ex-employees still “active” on the licence.
• Document automation: 12 seats, 4 active. Bought after a partner went on a course; never rolled out.
• E-signature: 3 separate accounts on personal cards because nobody set up a firm account.
• AI / writing tool: 6 seats, 2 active. Trial expanded; nobody paused it.

Quick wins from the seat-utilisation gap alone are usually £200–600/month for a 10-fee-earner firm. Free; just paperwork.

Hour 3: classify by job-to-be-done

Group every tool by what it's for, not what it's called. Five categories cover most:

1. Practice management — matters, time, billing, conflicts, client records. Usually one big system.
2. Documents — document management, automation, e-signature, redlining, OCR.
3. Communication — email, chat, video, telephony, intake forms.
4. Productivity — Office/Google, project management, password managers, AI assistants.
5. Compliance & finance — accounting, AML/KYC, conflicts, regulatory reporting.

For each category, look for two patterns:

• Overlap. Two tools doing the same job. Almost guaranteed to find at least one. Pick the one with higher actual usage, plan the cutover.
• Gap. A category with no tool but a real need (most often: AML/KYC, intake forms, or a proper matter tracker — see matter tracking sheet for the lightweight option).

Hour 4: the three cuts

At this point you have enough data to make three decisions. Don't try to make more.

Cut 1: cancel the unused

Tools where actual seat usage is < 30% of seats bought, or nobody named it in the fee-earner conversations. Cancel at renewal (or sooner if there's no commitment). Move the budget into a holding bucket; don't auto-spend it on replacements.

Cut 2: consolidate the duplicates

Where two tools serve the same purpose, pick one and decommission the other. Plan: communicate to users (one-week notice), set a hard end date, archive any data, cancel.

Cut 3: kill the personal cards

Anything currently on a personal card moves to a firm account with proper user management. Eliminates the “Sarah left and we lost access to all the files” risk. Slightly cheaper too — most SaaS price personal accounts at higher per-seat rates than firm accounts.

What you don't do today

Tempting but wrong moves at this stage:

• Buy anything new.Even if a gap is obvious. The new thing is a separate decision and a separate process. Today's job is the audit.
• Replace the practice management system.If it's clunky, it's clunky — that's a three-month project, not a half-day decision. Note the frustration; come back to it deliberately.
• Re-do everything because of AI. AI tooling is moving fast. The audit gives you a baseline; the AI-tooling decision can come after, with better data.

What good looks like at week 2

A clean spreadsheet listing every tool and its actual usage. Three to five tools cancelled or consolidated, saving somewhere between £4–15k/year for a 10–20 fee-earner firm. A named owner for each remaining tool. A short list of two or three gaps to address deliberately over the following months, with the budget freed up by the cuts available to fund them.

Re-run the audit annually. The accumulation that brought you here will happen again unless someone's explicitly watching for it.

If you'd rather have someone else run the day with you, that's the kind of work Techsperience does — bringing the spreadsheet, asking the awkward questions, and leaving you with a defensible cancel list by end of day.