What is a technology spend assessment?

A technology spend assessment is an independent review of everything a business pays for across software, telecom, vendors, and connectivity. It identifies overbilling, unused subscriptions, redundant tools, and overpriced contracts, then quantifies the savings available in dollars. Stackstone's assessment is free and takes under 30 minutes of your time.

What does a technology spend assessment include?

A thorough assessment looks across every category where spend accumulates quietly. Here is what gets reviewed and where the savings typically hide:

Ranges reflect industry benchmarks; actual results vary and savings are not guaranteed.

Two techniques do most of the work. Invoice auditing reconciles each bill against the contract behind it, catching rate mismatches, charges for disconnected services, and fees that were never agreed to. Benchmarking compares your rates and terms against what similar businesses currently pay in the market, which is how above-market pricing gets identified even when the invoice itself is technically accurate. An assessment that skips either one is only seeing half the picture.

What deliverables do you receive?

A finished assessment should hand you three working documents, not a slide deck of generalities:

• Findings report, a plain-English summary of what was reviewed, the billing errors and contract issues found, and how your rates compare against market benchmarks.
• Savings register, a line-item list of every opportunity with a projected dollar range, the effort involved, and who has to act. Unused software licenses usually dominate this list: Zylo's 2026 SaaS Management Index found organizations leave an average of 36% of their SaaS licenses unused.
• Renewal calendar, every contract end date and auto-renewal notice window, so negotiations start while you still have leverage rather than after a renewal locks in.

Each item in the register maps to a concrete fix, whether that's SaaS spend optimization, an ongoing telecom expense management program, or a straight renegotiation at renewal.

How to prepare: what documents will you need?

You don't need perfect records; surfacing what you've lost track of is part of the point. Gather what you can of the following and the advisor does the rest:

• The last 1–3 invoices for telecom, internet, software, and cloud services
• The underlying contracts or order forms for your largest vendors
• An export of technology-related payments from your accounting system and corporate cards, which is how expensed, department-level apps get caught
• A license or seat-count report from your identity provider or the tools themselves, if available

The accounting export matters more than most people expect. Shadow IT, technology bought outside the IT budget, is large enough that Gartner studies have put it at 30 to 40 percent of IT spending in large enterprises. Smaller companies are harder to measure, but the pattern is the same: spend that no inventory captures until someone reconciles the cards.

If you'd rather run the review yourself before involving anyone, our technology spend assessment checklist walks through the same document list and the category-by-category checks an advisor would run.

How do advisors get paid for an assessment?

The industry generally uses three compensation models, and it's worth understanding all of them before you engage anyone. Consulting firms charge time-based fees, an hourly rate or a monthly retainer, which keeps incentives simple but means you pay whether or not savings materialize. Some audit firms work on contingency, taking a percentage of what they recover, which costs nothing upfront but can bias the work toward easy, fast recoveries. Technology advisors in the sourcing channel are compensated through standard supplier commissions on the contracts they help clients place, which makes the advice free to the client but makes disclosure essential. None of these models is inherently wrong; the red flag is an advisor who won't tell you which one applies.

Stackstone's assessment is free. For optimization work, we're typically compensated through standard supplier commissions on the contracts we help you source and manage, so there is usually no direct cost to you. We never charge hourly or retainer fees; if an engagement ever includes a fee at all, it's only a share of savings actually realized, agreed in writing up front. We disclose exactly how we're paid for your engagement.

Assessment vs. audit vs. TEM vs. ITAM: what's the difference?

These four terms get used interchangeably, but they answer different questions on different timeframes:

TEM grew out of "telecom expense management," which covered phone and network costs only; modern programs cover the full vendor stack, which is where most overspending now hides. ITAM and its software-focused subset, software asset management (SAM), exist primarily to track assets and keep license compliance in order; cost reduction is a side effect rather than the goal. For cloud infrastructure the parallel discipline is FinOps, and it has plenty to work with: Flexera's 2026 State of the Cloud report estimates that 29% of cloud spend is wasted. An assessment is the diagnostic first step that tells you which of these disciplines, if any, you actually need; for the FinOps side, see cloud cost optimization.

How long does an assessment take, step by step?

1. Discovery call (20–30 minutes). Scope the review: locations, vendor count, biggest cost centers, and upcoming renewals.
2. Document collection (days 1–5). You share invoices, contracts, and accounting exports. A short checklist keeps this to under 30 minutes of your time.
3. Analysis (weeks 1–2). Invoice auditing against contracts, license counts against actual usage, and rate benchmarking against current market pricing.
4. Findings review (week 2–3). You get the findings report and savings register, walked through opportunity by opportunity. Nothing is implemented until you decide.
5. Implementation (optional, ongoing). Sourcing, negotiation, and cutover are sequenced around your renewal calendar: quick wins like billing-error disputes and license reclamation first, contract renegotiations as their windows open.

Red flags in a low-quality assessment

Free assessments are common in this industry, and the good ones are genuinely useful. Watch for the signs that a "free assessment" is really a sales script:

• Guaranteed savings percentages before anyone has seen your bills. Nobody can promise a number without reviewing an invoice. Credible advisors quote industry benchmark ranges and caveat them.
• No invoice-level review. If the process is a questionnaire instead of your actual bills and contracts, the output is guesswork.
• Every recommendation points to the same catalog. That is a reseller pitch, not an assessment; see independent advisor vs. reseller for how to tell the difference.
• Compensation isn't disclosed. You should know exactly how the advisor is paid before you act on the advice.
• Rip-and-replace bias. A quality assessment optimizes what you already have first; switching providers is one option, not the default recommendation.
• No benchmark data. "You're overpaying" means little without market rates to compare against.

Who should get a technology spend assessment?

• Companies with 10–500 employees and multiple tools, vendors, or locations
• Anyone whose technology spend grew organically without a recent review
• Businesses that haven't audited software, telecom, and vendor contracts in 12–24 months

The profile that benefits most is the business where nobody owns technology spend end to end: the office manager handles phones, department heads buy their own software, and finance sees only the totals. Multi-location businesses fit this profile almost by definition, because each site accumulates its own contracts and rates. If that sounds familiar, an assessment usually pays for the 30 minutes it asks of you many times over, and if it finds nothing, you've confirmed your spend is under control, which is worth knowing too.

Once the assessment is done, the follow-through is what keeps the savings. Our guide to reducing business technology spend covers the full framework, and the savings calculator gives you a first estimate in about two minutes.

By Shane Stewart, Founder · Last updated: July 2026.

• Contingency vs. retainer: how advisors get paid
• Independent advisor vs. reseller