Software Overlap Detection

Written byAnna Katharina Bollé

AI & IntelligenceAugust 17, 20269 min read

Managing corporate software expenses is increasingly difficult as software subscriptions spread quietly across company-wide contracts, department budgets, and employee corporate cards. Without centralised oversight, your company is likely paying twice for identical capabilities or carrying redundant parallel software licences that quietly drain cash. To help you regain control of your software budget, we built a smart software overlap detection template that automates this cleanup based on only one export as an input, and you can try it below.

Why software spend management is a challenge for modern finance teams

SaaS spend management has become a major headache for modern finance teams. In the UK, the median software spend for a typical company has reached £71,000 per year, marking a 19% increase compared to mid-2025 (2026, Cledara). This rapid growth means that software budgets now represent a substantial expense category that requires active, ongoing oversight rather than simple annual reviews.

The hidden costs of redundant licences and shadow IT

Much of this spending occurs outside the view of centralised procurement. On average, between 30% and 40% of IT spending within organisations consists of shadow IT, which is completely unmonitored by central IT or finance teams (2026, Spendhound). This is because IT and procurement departments typically manage only 15% of SAAS spend, with the remaining 85% purchased in a decentralised manner by individual business units or employees (2026, Zylo SAAS Management Index Report).

The financial consequences of this unmanaged sprawl are severe. UK businesses waste over £1.7 billion annually on unused software licences, while £1.3 billion is the commercial value of unlicensed software in the UK (2026, FMJ). In fact, nearly 20% of SaaS spend in UK enterprises is entirely lost to unused, underutilised, or duplicate software licences (2026, Certero and SME Today). This leakage makes it incredibly difficult for finance teams to keep software costs aligned with actual business needs.

How different teams contract with the same vendor independently

Because software purchasing has become so decentralised, different teams frequently buy the same tools independently. For instance, your engineering team might set up a contract for a development platform while individual marketing managers pay for the same software on their corporate cards. These parallel contracts are difficult to spot because the payments are spread across monthly invoices, employee card receipts, and prepaid expenses that rarely appear next to each other on the general ledger.

This lack of visibility causes 32% of UK organisations to routinely exceed their planned software budgets (2026, IT Brief). The problem is rarely simple double-billing, which is easy to spot in standard reconciliations. Instead, the real leakage is software overlap, which occurs when separate departments pay for different tools that serve the same core functional capabilities, or when teams purchase parallel contracts with identical vendors.

Traditional methods: the pain of manual SaaS spend optimisation

Historically, identifying these overlapping tools and redundant licences required hours of manual data cleansing. Finance teams had to export raw transaction records, manually standardise vendor names, group transactions by employee or cost centre, and reconstruct active subscription periods. This manual prep work took so much time that finance professionals were often already too exhausted when it came down to conducting the actual analysis.

To solve this problem, we developed an automated software overlap detection skill that does the heavy lifting for you. By combining the data-processing power of AI with the familiarity and calculation reliability of Excel, our tool cleans and standardises your transactions, groups spend by category, and flags potential duplicates automatically. This lets your finance team bypass the tedious cleanup phase and move straight to strategic action, such as renegotiating contracts, consolidating licences, or cancelling redundant systems.

Key learnings from building our software overlap detection tool

When we designed and tested this workbook, we focused on solving two main technical hurdles that finance teams face during manual audits. First, transaction descriptions are notoriously inconsistent, meaning we had to train our analysis to group fragmented merchant names into unified vendor profiles. Second, we realised that finance professionals do not trust black-box algorithms that output savings figures without showing the math.

That is why we decided to avoid hidden scripts and instead build the tool using transparent, native Excel formulas. This ensures that every flag and calculation remains fully auditable and can be traced directly back to your raw transaction data. By keeping the calculations completely visible, we give finance teams the absolute confidence they need to act on the recommended savings.

Inside the tool: how our software overlap detection workbook works

The final tool acts as a comprehensive, ready-to-use software rationalisation model. Instead of relying on proprietary dashboards, it operates entirely within a standard Excel workbook, delivering deep insights through four primary components:

• Overview: This tab summarises all identified cases across three distinct overlap types. It displays the total number of flagged items, potential annual savings, key vendor concentrations, and recommended actions in a clean, executive-ready dashboard.
• Duplicate vendor payments: This module flags potential individual licences alongside company-wide plans and parallel contracts with the same vendor. It details the vendor, invoice number, employee, cost centre, spend, months active, overlap period, duplicate type, and recommended action.
• Category overlap: This section groups your SAAS and AI tools by functional category. It lists each vendor with its annual spend, a plain-English description of its features, and details potential overlap cases showing combined spend, potentially recoverable spend, exact feature overlap, unique capabilities, and recommended actions.
• Reconciliation backup: This sheet includes a clean, untouched copy of the original transaction data as the ultimate source of truth, ensuring that every analysis reconciles perfectly to your accounting exports.

For example, the tool might detect three different employees paying £15 per month for individual Trello licences on corporate cards. If the marketing department already pays £2,000 annually for an enterprise Asana contract, the workbook will flag this under Category Overlap. It will outline the £540 combined annual spend, flag the potentially recoverable amount, and recommend consolidating all users under Asana.

How to run your own software rationalisation audit today

Running a software audit does not require a massive software deployment. To get started, you will need to export around 12 months of software, SAAS, AI, and licensing transactions from your general ledger or expense account. For the best results, ensure your export includes fields like transaction date, merchant name, amount, employee name, and cost centre.

Depending on your preferred workflow, you can run the analysis using ChatGPT or Claude. Simply select your tool and follow the respective steps below:

• Using ChatGPT: Upload our software overlap detection skill ZIP file and your raw transaction workbook directly into the chat, then copy and paste the provided prompt.
• Using Claude: Add our ZIP file to your Claude skill library, open a fresh chat, upload your transaction workbook, and run the /moss-software-overlap-detection command.

Once the AI assistant finishes generating the analysis, download and open the workbook in Excel. Confirm that the total transaction count and value reconcile perfectly to your source export, and review the main formulas on the summary tab before starting your flagged-case analysis. From there, you can immediately begin reviewing the high-priority duplicates and speaking with internal owners to lock in your software savings.

Frequently asked questions

Sources: Cledara SaaS Spend Index Q3 (2026), Spendhound SaaS Management Statistics (2026), G2 and TechRepublic via FMJ UK Software Licensing Waste (2026), Certero and SME Today SaaS Waste and SME Redundancy (2026), IT Brief UK IT Leadership SaaS Survey (2026), Zylo and Torii SaaS Overlap and Sprawl Survey (2026).