18 September 2026 · IT Governance · Mike Fraser

Your IT bill, read like the rest of the P&L

A free workbook and board template that sorts every technology cost by what it does for the organisation, runs six tests for waste, and prints one page for the board pack.

In November 2025 ITBrief UK, a technology trade publication, put the share of UK software subscription spend that is wasted at 18 to 20 per cent: licences nobody uses, tools that duplicate each other, and accounts still open for people who have left. A year earlier EasySAM, a software licensing firm, found that half of the enterprises it surveyed wasted at least a tenth of their software and cloud spend.

Those figures are easy to believe and hard to act on. A finance director who reads them still has one line in the management accounts marked “IT”, and no way to say which fifth of it is waste.

The usual answer is that this is the IT director's job, and it is. A good head of IT knows the contracts, the renewal dates and the tools nobody opens. Most mid-market IT budgets were inherited rather than built, though. They are a stack of contracts signed by previous managers, a managed-service invoice that renews every year, and subscriptions on company cards that appear only in the card statements. Knowing the contracts and showing the board what they buy are two separate jobs.

I have walked into more inherited IT budgets than I would like to admit. Below is the toolkit I run first. It is free. The workbook is an Excel file with no macros. You list each technology cost once, from the ledger, the managed-service invoices and the card statements, and most organisations end up with 30 to 80 rows. The workbook sorts each cost into three groups: spend that keeps the organisation running, spend that improves what it already does, and spend that changes how it works. It then runs six tests for waste, each giving a pound figure and one line of explanation, and prints a single A4 page for the board pack. A three-slide template turns the same numbers into a board paper.

Of the numbers it produces, the split matters first. The common benchmark is about 70 per cent on running costs, 20 on improvement and 10 on change. An organisation that spends 85 per cent on running costs has 15 per cent left for everything the board says it wants from technology. In an organisation that has run the same systems for ten years, that is the number to check first.

Plan 90 minutes the first time. Most of it goes on finding the contracts. The first run will not be exact, and it does not need to be. Eighty per cent of the costs, sorted and tested, gives the board more to work with than a single line.

There are limits. The workbook cannot tell you whether the systems are the right ones, or what replacing them would cost. That takes someone who has read the contracts and watched people use the systems every day. What it does give you is where the money goes. That is enough to start the board discussion.

Most of that wasted fifth renews automatically. It will renew again next year unless someone lists it.

If you would rather have this done for you, with a plan for what to change first, that is the Technology Return Review: three weeks, fixed fee.