SaaS Account Inventory: A Template for Small Teams

A free CSV template plus what each column is for — including the four columns that turn a spending list into something you can actually offboard and audit against.

By the founder — infrastructure engineer, 15 years (bio) · Updated 2026-08-11

Most small businesses have a list of their software somewhere. It’s usually a spending list: tool name, monthly cost, maybe who signed up. That’s enough to answer “what are we paying for” and nothing else.

It isn’t enough when somebody leaves, when a client asks what systems hold their data, when an insurer asks the same question, or when you need to know whether a breach at a vendor touched you. Those questions need four columns a spending list doesn’t have.

This is the template we use, and what each column is actually for.

Download the CSV template — no email required, no signup. Opens in Excel, Google Sheets, Numbers, or anything else. Delete the example row and start filling.

The columns, and why each one exists

The obvious ones

Tool, Category, What it is for. Category matters more than it looks — sorting by it is how you find that you’re paying for two of the same thing. “What it is for” should be one plain sentence. If nobody can write that sentence, you’ve found your first cancellation.

Annual cost, Billing cycle, Renewal date. Record cost annually even for monthly tools, so lines are comparable. Billing cycle earns its place because six of the 20 products we track bill annually only — on those there is no mid-term downgrade, so the renewal date is the only day of the year your decision matters.

Plan or tier. Vendors rename tiers constantly, and the plan you researched two years ago may not exist now. Recording the exact tier name means you can tell whether you’re on something current or something grandfathered.

The four that do the real work

Business owner. A named person, not a department. Not “whoever set it up” — someone accountable for deciding at renewal whether this still earns its place. Tools without an owner are the ones that quietly renew for six years.

Admin account. Which login controls this? This is the column that saves you, and almost nobody has it. When someone leaves, the question isn’t just “did we remove their access” — it’s “did they own the admin account for anything.” A subscription whose recovery email is a mailbox you no longer control can’t be cancelled, repaid, or exported. Use a role address you control (admin@, billing@), not an individual’s mailbox.

Access granted to. What company data does this tool reach? Your email, your files, your calendar, your CRM, nothing? Most tools connect through a “Sign in with Google” grant, and that grant survives cancelling the subscription. This is the column that turns your spending list into an access review — the distinction covered in the subscription audit.

Seats paid vs Seats in use. Two columns, deliberately. The gap between them is money, and it grows silently every time somebody leaves.

The three that answer other people’s questions

Data it holds, MFA enforced, SSO. You will be asked all three eventually — by a client’s security questionnaire, a cyber insurance application, or a prospect’s procurement process. Answering from a maintained table takes ten minutes. Reconstructing it under a deadline takes days, and that’s how people end up guessing on forms they’ve signed. See the client security questionnaire guide for what gets asked.

Cancellation route — self-serve, or must you email support? Recording it while you’re calm is worth a lot when you’re trying to cut costs in a hurry. How hard a product is to leave is a genuine cost of owning it, and one of the things we time in our own methodology.

Filling it in the first time

Don’t try to do it from memory — you’ll produce a list of the tools you think about, which is not the same as the tools you pay for. Work the six discovery sources in the subscription audit: thirteen months of card statements, receipt searches in your inbox, personal app-store subscriptions, your identity provider’s third-party app grants, your password manager vault, and your DNS TXT records.

Expect two hours and expect surprises. The app-store subscriptions and the OAuth grants are the two that consistently turn up things nobody knew about.

Fill the easy columns for everything first, then go deep. Getting every tool listed with an owner and a cost beats a beautifully complete record of four tools and nothing about the rest. A partial inventory is useful; a missing one isn’t.

Keeping it alive

An inventory that isn’t maintained is worse than none, because you’ll trust it. Three triggers, and only three:

Someone buys a new tool → one row, same day. This is the whole discipline. Everything else is recovery from having skipped it.

Someone leaves → filter by Admin account and by Business owner, before their access is cut. Both columns, because the two failure modes are different: their access still working, and their mailbox owning something you can’t reach. The offboarding checklist covers the access side; this table covers the ownership side, and the former-employee guide walks the full sequence.

60 days before your largest renewal → review every row. Update “Last reviewed” and set “Decision” on each: keep, downgrade, consolidate, cut.

What it’s worth

The savings are real but they’re not the reason to do this. The reason is that four separate questions — what do we pay for, who can get into it, what happens when someone leaves, and what do we tell a client about their data — all get answered from one table you already have.

Small teams normally answer those four questions four different ways, badly, under time pressure. This is one afternoon that stops that.

The template is a plain CSV with no tracking, no macros, and no signup. Pricing figures referenced above are verified list prices from vendors’ official pages on 2026-07-30 — see the pricing tracker. This page contains no affiliate links.