The new financial year is a few days old. The board pack for the close is being assembled, last year is being put to bed, and the planning conversations for the year ahead are starting. It is the one window where a CFO can look at a cost line with fresh eyes before the next set of renewals quietly rolls over.

So here is a belief worth testing in that window. Most mid-market CFOs hold it, and it is quietly expensive. The belief is that software is an IT cost. IT owns it. The CFO sees a category total once a year and applies none of the procurement discipline that every other major supplier category gets.

I understand why a careful CFO believes it. It used to be true. A decade ago software was something you bought and IT maintained. The mental model, software is IT's domain, was correct. It also feels like good division of responsibility. Most CFOs do not want to build a deep view of software for its own sake, and IT exists precisely to handle technology decisions. Delegating it looks like discipline, not avoidance. Until you look at the total.

Here is the pattern I keep seeing in the engagements I have worked on. The world changed and the model did not. Software stopped being something you buy and became something you rent, from many vendors, across every function, renewing constantly. The category grew. The ownership never moved to catch up. And the "SaaS is IT" framing now hides three things, each one a place where the money walks out.

It hides that most of the spend is not in IT at all. Marketing has built its own stack. Sales has a CRM with several tools bolted onto it. Finance, operations, people and culture, each has quietly assembled a software estate of its own, bought on a card, renewing on autopilot, invisible to whoever thinks they own the software budget. When a business inventories it properly, a meaningful share of total software spend sits outside IT entirely. Shadow SaaS is not a rare failure. It is the normal state of a category no one was asked to govern.

It hides the renewal problem. Software contracts default to renew. The price ticks up, the invoice is approved, everyone moves on. That quietly accepted uplift compounds, year after year, into real money no one ever decided to spend. Renewal autopilot is the silent one, because every individual renewal looks reasonable in the moment.

And it hides the gap between what you pay for and what you use. The licences a business is billed for and the people actually logging in are rarely the same group. Seats bought for a project that ended. People who have left. Tools adopted with enthusiasm and abandoned within a quarter, still billing every month.

So the truth is plain. SaaS is not an IT cost. It is a procurement cost that has been misfiled, and the misfiling is the whole problem, because procurement disciplines never get applied to it. The CFOs who mentally reclassify it, and treat it the way they treat any major supplier category, consolidated, governed, renewals actively challenged, usage checked against what is paid for, tend to get a meaningful amount back in the first year. Not through a heroic cost-cutting drive. Just by looking at a cost line nobody was looking at.

The reframe is the move. The day you stop thinking of software as IT's budget and start thinking of it as a supplier category you have never run procurement on, the work becomes obvious. You do not need a project. You need an owner, a single view of the total, and a rhythm that meets every renewal with a question instead of a signature.

The question worth taking into your next leadership meeting is a simple one. Who actually owns our total software spend. Not the IT portion. The total. And when did anyone last challenge a renewal rather than approve it. If the honest answers are "no one" and "I am not sure," that is not a sign of poor management. It is the most accessible cost work available to you this year, sitting in a line you had filed under done.

Most of the CFOs I now work closely with first reached me by replying to a piece of this newsletter. If you have read this far, that is the signal. Era Group runs a complimentary spend review for a small number of CFOs each quarter. It begins as a conversation. Reply, and I will personally find a time.

A mid-market professional services firm in Sydney went looking for its software budget last month and could not find it in one place.

IT had a number. It was a confident number. It was also only part of the picture.

The rest was scattered. Marketing had its own stack. The client teams had tools bolted onto the CRM. Finance and operations had each quietly built a small estate of their own, bought on a card, renewing on autopilot, invisible to whoever thought they owned the software budget.

No one had done anything wrong. Each tool was bought for a good reason by someone solving a real problem. But no single person owned the total, so no single person ever challenged a renewal. The price ticked up each year, the invoice was approved, everyone moved on.

When the CFO finally pulled it into one view, two things stood out. The total was larger than the leadership team would have guessed. And the licences being paid for and the people actually logging in were not the same group.

That is the quiet truth about software in the mid-market. It is not an IT cost. It is a supplier category that has never had procurement run on it. The day you treat it like procurement, consolidated, governed, renewals met with a question instead of a signature, the work becomes obvious.

So before the next renewal rolls over: who owns your total software spend. Not the IT portion. The total. If the honest answer is no one, you already know where to look first.