Unless you're really on top of your SaaS usage, there's a decent chance that somewhere in the business, a tool that nobody has opened in months is auto-renewing on a card nobody is really watching. There could even be several, thanks to a per-seat plan that outgrew its team or a trial that quietly converted. The fact that it's rarely a dramatic waste is why nobody acts on it. But in a software business, where every team buys its own tooling, those small amounts add up to real money leaving on autopilot.
The scale is easy to underestimate. Zylo's 2026 SaaS Management Index, which is built on large enterprises, puts the average portfolio at 305 applications and average annual SaaS spend at $55.7 million, up 8% on the year even though the number of applications used has stopped growing. Measured against recommended utilisation, 36% of licences go unused.
The figure most relevant to finance is how the tools are arriving. Spend on SaaS bought through expense claims rose 267% year on year, and business units now control 81% of SaaS spend while IT manages 15%. A finance team at a company of 50 to 300 people is working with a fraction of that spend, but in the end it comes down to the same pattern: more tools than anyone can list, bought outside procurement, paid on cards nobody reviews.
In this article we'll cover the two halves of the sprawl problem, why the annual renewal review catches neither of them in time, and what a card per subscription does about the half finance owns.
The two halves of SaaS sprawl
One half of SaaS sprawl is usage: which tools are being used, by whom, and whether you are paying for more seats than you need. The other half is payment: whether each subscription is visible, tied to an owner and easy to stop. The usage half needs adoption data most finance teams don't have and is a fair amount of work to get. It's also hard for finance to influence in any meaningful way. Luckily the payment half, which is the one that leaks money on renewals every month, is within reach. Confusing the two is how companies buy usage analytics before they have stopped the charges they already know are waste.
The annual renewal audit is too late
The usual answer to sprawl is an annual renewal review which surfaces the problem once a year, after twelve months of auto-renewals have already gone through. A tool flagged as redundant in the March review was paid for in the eleven months before it, and keeps being paid for if nobody acts on the flag. In this sense, an audit is just a once-a-year snapshot of a problem that runs continuously, so it always arrives after the money has left.
The point is that you don't need usage data to stop a charge you already know is waste. Usage data tells you which subscriptions to cancel, but actually stopping the payment can be the main stumbling block.
Attach the control to the payment
To really tackle subscription sprawl, your best option is to attach the control to the payment itself rather than to a spreadsheet reviewed once a year. Give each subscription its own dedicated virtual card with a set limit, and every SaaS charge becomes visible, attributable to a specific tool and owner, and stoppable the moment that tool is flagged as redundant.
This is what Moss cards do. A dedicated virtual card per subscription (Moss calls it a merchant card) means each renewal is a charge on a card someone can see, with the tool's accounting attributes already attached, rather than one line among fifty on a shared card statement. The card can be frozen or terminated the instant a tool is no longer wanted, and the limit stops a renewal that comes in higher than agreed.
If you want to understand the usage side, you can try a dedicated SaaS-management platform. Moss makes every subscription visible and stoppable at the point of payment; the SaaS-management platform tells you whether a tool is worth keeping at all. Run together, you know what you are paying for and what you are using.
With a card behind every subscription, a renewal becomes a decision someone makes rather than a surprise on the statement. Find out more about Moss cards and how they work here.
