There is a card in your firm with other people’s software on it.
You know roughly what’s on it. Not exactly — nobody knows exactly — but you know the shape of it.
A client’s inventory add-on that you set up during onboarding because they couldn’t get past the payment screen. A payroll tool someone put on the firm card in March and meant to move over. Two subscriptions for a client who left last year, which you’re fairly sure are still running, though checking would mean going through statements you’d rather not go through.
Nobody decided this. It accumulated. And now, as an accountant or bookkeeper, it’s yours to reconcile every month.
The month-end version of the problem
The people who feel this are not the people who agreed to it.
A partner said yes to a client once, in a meeting, as a small courtesy. What that turned into is a recurring reconciliation task with no owner, no record, and no clean way to finish. If you’re the one doing the books, you know the specific texture of it:
Charges arrive from vendors you have to identify before you can code them. Some are obviously Client A’s. Some could be Client A’s or Client B’s, because both use the same tool and the vendor’s descriptor doesn’t say which account it belongs to. Some are for a client you’re no longer sure is a client.
Then the amounts change. A subscription that was £29 a month is £34 this month because they added a seat, or upgraded plans. You find out only by comparing this month’s statement to last month’s.
Then getting it reimbursed becomes a pain — you need to dig up old receipts and share them with your clients. All of it is tedious, all of it is administrative burden, and all of it is a drain on your time.
The part nobody has added up
Here’s the question worth asking your partner, and the reason to ask it is that almost nobody knows the answer:
How much are we carrying in client software right now?
Not what we spend on our own tools — what we have outstanding on subscriptions belonging to clients.
Most firms cannot answer this. The number is spread across two or three cards, several staff members, and many months of partial reimbursement. When firms do work it out, the amount is generally much bigger than anyone assumed — because a handful of small charges has quietly swelled into a real one.
As an accountant, you are the person best placed to find that number.
Why it stays broken
The obstacle isn’t that nobody cares — it’s that the problem is distributed exactly badly. No single charge justifies a conversation, so £29 here and £60 there never gets raised, and the aggregate never gets seen. It sits between practice management, billing, and client service, which means it belongs to whoever is doing the reconciliation that week. And it only grows: every new client adds to it, every tool a client adopts adds to it, and it moves quietly enough that nobody notices the slope.
So it persists — absorbed by the people doing the books, invisible to the people who could change it.
What fixing it looks like
The fix is not to stop doing it. Clients genuinely value this — it’s why the arrangement exists. They don’t want fifteen vendor relationships and fifteen renewal dates any more than you do.
The fix is to stop doing it informally.
Get it visible first. Every client subscription in one place: what it is, whose it is, what it costs, when it renews. This step alone removes most of the monthly pain, because the reconciliation stops being detective work. You are no longer identifying charges — you are confirming ones you already expected.
Visibility also settles the arguments. When a client queries a charge, you have the record. When a subscription price changes, you see it in the month it changes rather than the month you happen to compare statements. When a client leaves, you can see everything of theirs still running on your card before it renews again.
Then get it priced. Once it’s visible, it can carry a margin — a percentage, a flat handling fee per subscription, whatever the firm decides. That’s the partner’s call, not yours. But it’s your evidence that makes the call possible, because until someone produces the total, there is nothing to price.
Then get it billed. The charges land on the client’s invoice with everything else. There’s no reimbursement to chase because there’s nothing to reimburse. The task you’ve been doing every month simply stops existing.
Making the case internally
If you want this fixed, the framing that moves partners is not “this is annoying.” It’s the total.
Bring three things:
The outstanding balance — what the firm currently has out in client software. Even an estimate. Even a rough one. The number does the persuading.
The time cost — how long the monthly reconciliation actually takes you, honestly counted, including the queries and the chasing.
The exposure — the subscriptions still running for clients who have left, and the ones that renewed at a higher price without anyone approving it.
Presented as an operational mess, this gets sympathy and no action. Presented as an unpriced service the firm is providing on credit, at its own risk, with no margin — it gets a decision.
Because that’s what it is. Every month, your firm advances the money, carries the renewal risk, absorbs the admin, and bills none of it. You’ve been running a procurement service for years. The only thing it’s ever been missing is a price.
AppVentory tracks every client subscription automatically, applies the margin your firm sets, and reconciles the charges without the back-and-forth. Book a demo.
