The Systems Audit: How to Find the EBITDA Hiding in Your Software Stack

A systems audit is a structured review of every tool, spreadsheet and manual workflow a business runs on, measured in dollars and hours, ending in a prioritized plan. It answers three questions: what are we paying for, what is it costing us in time and errors, and what should we change first?

It is not a security audit and not a full technology due diligence, though it borrows from both:

1. Software you pay for and don't use

According to Zylo’s 2026 SaaS Management Index, the average organization uses only 54 percent of its provisioned licenses. Smaller companies rarely track this at all: tools are bought on a credit card, seats are never removed, and two apps quietly do the same job.

2. Hours spent between systems

This is usually the larger number. Every time data is typed from one system into another, someone is being paid to be an integration. Salesforce research found sales reps spend only 28 percent of their time actually selling; operations teams in small companies often fare no better.

3. Revenue that leaks out

Leads that never get a reply, quotes nobody follows up, orders lost in an inbox. Every order that has to be retyped from an email into a system is a chance to drop one.

4. Errors and rework

Wrong prices, double bookings, inventory that doesn't match. Gartner puts the average annual cost of poor data quality at $12.9 million for organizations; at a smaller company it shows up as credits, write-offs and angry customers.

1. Inventory every tool and spreadsheet. Pull card statements and accounting records for software spend; ask each team what they open every day. Spreadsheets that run a process count.
2. Record cost, seats and usage. Monthly cost, seats paid, seats active in the last 30 days, contract renewal date.
3. Walk the core workflows. Follow lead-to-cash, order-to-delivery and hire-to-payroll with the people who do them. Watch, don't interview.
4. Time the manual work. For each hand-off, estimate hours per week. Rough numbers are fine; zero is the only wrong answer.
5. Map the data flows. Draw where each core record (customer, order, invoice) is created, copied and reported. Every copy is a place for errors.
6. Check the risks. Admin access, backups, single points of failure (people and systems), anything regulated.
7. Give every item a verdict. Keep, consolidate, cut or automate.
8. Cost the roadmap. Each initiative gets an estimated annual impact, a cost, an effort score and an owner.

Use a simple formula and be conservative: hours per week × loaded hourly cost × 52.

For example, the BLS puts median pay for customer service representatives at $21.53 an hour. A task that takes six hours a week costs about $6,700 a year in wages alone (6 × $21.53 × 52), before benefits and payroll taxes. Across a dozen such tasks, you are looking at a meaningful EBITDA line, and that is before counting what those hours could be spent on instead.

Tool sprawl shows up fast in an audit. ProducifyX, a recruiting firm we work with, was stitching together eight separate tools for hiring, from applicant tracking to video interviews to e-signatures; we replaced them with one platform.

Rank initiatives on two axes: annual EBITDA impact and effort. Do the high-impact, low-effort items first; they fund the credibility for the rest.

The same method works before close as part of operational or technology due diligence: it surfaces key-person risk, fragile spreadsheets and integration costs while they can still affect price and the plan. After close, it is the backbone of the 100-day plan for systems and feeds directly into the value creation plan.