If you run a business, odds are you have a few different tools that help you get the job done. These might be software, computer programs or other management systems that allow you to run your business efficiently and stay profitable. The only problem with relying on these tools is that over time, your subscription can get a little unwieldy.
That’s why you need a tech stack audit. These audits are designed to assess all of the tools in your arsenal to help you decide which you need to keep and which you can cancel. It helps you save money and time that you can reinvest in other areas of your business.
Let’s look at the basic steps required to perform a tech stack audit.
1. Set Up Your Tracker
The very first step in a tech audit is to set up some type of tracker. This might be a spreadsheet, a list or even a dashboard in another program. Whatever you choose, it just needs to be a place where you can easily see all of the different tools in your tech stack.
You should break up fields into a few different categories:
- Name of tool/software
- Department that uses it
- Number of users
- Cost per month
These are just the basic categories. You can build out your document or dashboard to be as complex or simple as you need to get a good idea of how your tech is helping your business. For example, some people will add a category where they rank how often they use the tool or how much revenue is attributed to it.
2. Evaluate Each Tool
Next, you need to go through and evaluate each tool on your list. This step is what takes the most time and can be very labor intensive. You need someone who’s familiar with all aspects of your business to go through your tools one by one and assess how often you use them, how much you pay for them and if your revenue still supports those expenses.
Another valuable process that you can run in tandem with your tech stack audit is a user access review. This is a way to quickly determine who on your team has access to which of these programs and if they’re using that platform frequently to do their job. It’s an easier way to assess which teams need the tool and if you can possibly downgrade your subscription or plan type based on those findings.
3. Make Necessary Changes
After you’ve evaluated all of your tools, you should have a clear picture of which to keep and which to cancel. In fact, you might be surprised by how much money you were wasting every month on tools your team doesn’t even use!
Making these decisions can be tough, especially if something isn’t clearly valuable or invaluable. To help you decide, think about these three key points:
- Is the tool helping part of your team drive revenue that is greater than the cost each month?
- Does the tool save your team members significant time on repetitive or routine processes?
- Does the tool generate valuable data that you use in your marketing and sales processes?
If the answer to all of these questions is “no,” then you likely aren’t getting enough out of the tool to warrant paying for it anymore.
Auditing your tech stack is a big undertaking, but it can result in significant savings. Gather some team members who know your business well and start pulling together a document where you can compile your data. You might be surprised by what you find!
