How a CFO took back control of $2M in IT assets in 90 days

An anonymised account of one finance leader's first 90 days running an IT spend cleanup at a 280-person services company. The exact 30/60/90 plan, the meetings that mattered, the savings that landed.

Names changed. Numbers real. The CFO in this story — call her Marta — joined a 280-person professional services firm with about $2.1M of annual IT spend spread across 142 vendors and zero unified visibility. The board had asked for a 15% reduction. She delivered 28% in 90 days and built the dashboard that locked it in. Here's how.

Day 0 — the starting state

• 142 vendors paid through finance, plus an unknown number of expense-reimbursed SaaS subscriptions.
• Asset register was a Google Sheet last meaningfully updated 9 months ago.
• Three people thought they "owned" software renewals. None owned the same set.
• An auto-renewal had triggered the previous Friday for a $48k contract no one had used in 4 months.
• The board wanted a quarterly IT spend dashboard. There wasn't one.

Sound familiar? It is the modal state of any growing company that has been moving fast for a few years.

Week 1 — pick the platform, pull the data

• Selected an IT asset management platform after evaluating three over four days. Decision criteria from the buyer's guide: identity sync, real license utilisation, contract parsing, renewal alerts.
• Connected Google Workspace (the IdP) → instant headcount of 280 active employees, 41 inactive accounts still consuming licenses.
• Pulled SaaS billing data from the corporate AmEx and ACH records — first pass at "what do we pay for."

Week 2 — license utilisation

• Connected Slack, Zoom, Microsoft 365, GitHub, Adobe, Notion, Asana, HubSpot, Salesforce. Pulled last-login data.
• First shock: 23% of paid SaaS seats hadn't been used in 60+ days.
• Second shock: there were two project management tools (Asana + a forgotten ClickUp instance) and three video tools (Zoom, Google Meet, a Teams trial that "graduated" into a paid plan).

Week 3 — contracts

• Uploaded every contract PDF the procurement inbox could find: 87 contracts.
• The platform parsed renewal dates and notice periods. 14 contracts were already inside their notice window — meaning auto-renewal could not be stopped without paying for another year. That alone forced a triage.
• Built the contract owner mapping: every contract attached to a person and a cost centre.

Week 4 — first board update

• One dashboard. Four KPIs (spend, utilisation, renewal pipeline, asset coverage).
• Identified $148k of immediate-cancellation savings: dormant trials, unused tools, duplicate subscriptions.
• No cuts implemented yet. The number was the headline; the discipline came next.

The cuts (in order)

1. Dead trials and dormant tools — 11 SaaS subscriptions cancelled outright. Saving: $84k/year.
2. Inactive seats — 64 seats reclaimed across Adobe, Slack, Notion, Zoom, GitHub. Saving: $112k/year.
3. Tier downgrades — Microsoft 365 E5 → E3 for 80% of users (no one needed Defender, those who did kept E5). Saving: $96k/year.
4. Vendor consolidation — ClickUp dropped (everyone was on Asana). Teams trial cancelled (Slack + Zoom stayed). Saving: $52k/year.
5. Renegotiation — three biggest vendors (Salesforce, Adobe, AWS) pushed for renegotiation using utilisation data. Saving: $241k/year on annualised basis.

Total annualised savings landed in month two: $585k, or 28% of baseline.

The policies (so it stays cut)

• 90-day pre-renewal alert on every contract, routed to the owner and finance.
• Quarterly utilisation review — any tool below 60% utilisation gets a "use it or lose it" decision from its owner.
• New software requires CFO sign-off above $1k/month. Below that, the budget owner can self-serve but the cost shows on the dashboard.
• Offboarding triggers automatic license reclaim and hardware return tracking.
• No more single-IT-mailbox renewal management. Every contract has an owner.

• Automated dashboard — finance, IT, and exec team all see the same four KPIs in real time.
• Monthly cadence — first Tuesday of every month, a 30-minute "renewal pipeline" stand-up with the contract owners. Anything renewing in the next 90 days is reviewed. No exceptions.
• Quarterly board pack — IT spend trend, savings achieved, savings forecast, asset coverage. Two slides.
• Hiring — added a part-time IT operations role to own asset assignment, offboarding, and the day-to-day register. The savings paid for the role four times over.

The board update at day 90

What you can copy

The 30/60/90 structure transfers cleanly to any company between 50 and 1,000 employees:

• Month 1 — visibility only. No cuts. Build the source of truth.
• Month 2 — cuts in the order listed above. Always trials → inactive seats → tier downgrades → vendor consolidation → renegotiation.
• Month 3 — policies and automation. The discipline must outlive your attention.

The order matters. Cutting before you have visibility is the most common reason these initiatives stall — finance picks the wrong tool, productivity craters, and the project becomes politically toxic.