Six audits to run before your FY27 budget locks
A budget is a stack of assumptions. Six free audits test them against your own exports before the numbers lock, and each one names the budget line it corrects.
A budget is a stack of assumptions, and most of them come from a spreadsheet nobody has audited since last year. The revenue forecast assumes the pipeline is real. The close calendar assumes the ledger is clean. The software line assumes every seat is in use. Six free audits test those assumptions against your own exports in about fifteen minutes of run time, before the numbers lock.
Each audit corrects one budget assumption
Every audit in the suite takes a file you already have, runs deterministic detector rules against it in your browser, and returns a punchlist. The file is parsed on your machine and never leaves your device. Here is what each one feeds, and what it corrects.
| Audit | Feed it | It flags | Budget line it corrects |
|---|---|---|---|
| Revenue Recovery | Sales, quotes or customer list (about 5 min) | Dormant accounts, forgotten quotes, aging receivables, pricing leakage | Revenue forecast |
| Commercial Pipeline | CRM opportunity export (about 2 min) | Stalled deals, past-close-date opportunities, owner concentration, mega-deal outliers | Pipeline coverage and win-rate assumptions |
| Finance Close | GL or trial balance (about 2 min) | Weekend postings, stale suspense items, duplicate postings, period-cutoff anomalies | Close calendar and audit-fee assumptions |
| Ops & Procurement | PO log or AP transactions (about 2 min) | Duplicate vendors, price drift, off-contract spend, duplicate invoices | Vendor consolidation savings |
| Legal & Contracts | CLM or contract-tracker export (about 2 min) | Auto-renewals firing soon, expired-but-active contracts, missing notice periods | Renewal calendar and committed spend |
| SaaS Spend | SaaS register or SSO user export (about 2 min) | Shelfware, duplicate categories, orphaned seats, imminent renewals | Software line |
The order that pays back fastest
Run them in the order the budget is built, revenue first and cost second, because the first two decide how much room the other four have.
- Commercial Pipeline, then Revenue Recovery. A forecast built on a pipeline carrying stalled deals and past-close-date opportunities overstates coverage by exactly the amount of dead weight in the export. Strip it out first. Then look for money you already earned: forgotten quotes and dormant accounts are revenue that needs a phone call, not a campaign.
- Finance Close. The close audit is the one controllers run before a period locks. Run it before the budget does and the findings, stale suspense items and manual-entry concentration, become next year's process fixes instead of next year's surprises.
- Ops & Procurement and Legal & Contracts. Duplicate vendors and off-contract spend are the cheapest savings in any plan, because the saving is a consolidation and not a negotiation. The contract audit then tells you which of those commitments auto-renew, and when the notice window closes.
- SaaS Spend. Last, because it is the line most plans carry on autopilot. The 2026 SaaS Management Index from Zylo found that 46 percent of SaaS licences went unused in a typical 30-day period. The audit finds the shelfware on your own register and puts a renewal date next to each finding.
What the audits are, and what they are not
These are register-hygiene tools. They apply fixed rules to the file you give them, and the same file returns the same findings every time. That repeatability is the point: a punchlist you can re-run next month shows whether the fixes held.
The Legal & Contracts audit reads the metadata in your register, dates, counterparties, values and renewal flags. It does not read or interpret contract language, so clause-level review stays with counsel. Everything else in the suite works on transactions and records, and every punchlist exports as a CSV you can hand to the owner of the fix.
Who runs which audit
Each audit has a natural owner, and the whole suite fits in one working session if you split it that way. The CFO office or controller runs Finance Close. Sales operations or RevOps runs Commercial Pipeline and Revenue Recovery. Procurement and accounts payable run Ops & Procurement. Legal operations runs Legal & Contracts, with procurement alongside. IT or finance operations runs SaaS Spend. Book fifteen minutes with each owner, ask them to bring the export, and run the audit live. The finding that matters is the one the owner recognises on screen, because that is the one that gets fixed.
End the session with one sheet: the finding, the owner, the budget line it moves and the date it will be fixed. Six audits produce a sheet short enough to read in a budget meeting and specific enough to hold someone to.
From punchlist to plan
A punchlist is a list of facts. The plan is a decision on each one. Group the findings into three piles. Fix this quarter: duplicates, shelfware, forgotten quotes. Negotiate before the renewal date: the contracts the legal and SaaS audits surface. Rebuild or replace: the platform lines where you use a fraction of the product and the renewal keeps climbing.
The third pile is where a two-week Strategy engagement earns its fee. It converts your six punchlists into one written memo: the budget lines the findings change, the alternatives with a number and a window on each, and the sequence that holds the total flat. Start with the audit suite, then size the software line with the SaaS stack audit calculator.
Sources: Zylo, 2026 SaaS Management Index
Read more: All six audits · Run a stack audit before you refactor · Stack rationalisation brief · Strategy