The software-spend audit for QuickBooks and Xero
The software spend audit that finds what your card tools structurally cannot see.
Card tools only see spend on their own card. Your books see everything: ACH, checks, annual invoices, reimbursed cards. ShadowLedger reads your QuickBooks or Xero data and surfaces the duplicate tools, zombie subscriptions, and silent price hikes leaking money out of it.
- DatadogRenews 10d$890.00
ACH / bank billed by ACH transfer, so no card statement shows it
- GustoRenews 3d$312.00
ACH / bank bank debit straight from the operating account
- OpenAI ChatGPT$250.00
ACH / bank $3,000 annual invoice for the AI seats, paid by bill pay
- HubSpot$200.00
ACH / bank $2,400 annual invoice, normalized to monthly
Sample figures. Your audit reads your own ledger.
How it works
From ledger to leak report in three steps.
How does a software spend audit work?
You export a CSV from any accounting tool or connect QuickBooks Online or Xero read-only, and the engine reads your vendor payments and ranks what it finds by what it costs you. No procurement questionnaires, no browser extensions, no agents on laptops. Your accounting data already knows what your company pays for.
Upload or connect
Drop a CSV export from any accounting tool or bank (sign conventions are auto-detected), or connect QuickBooks Online or Xero through their own OAuth flow, which ShadowLedger only ever uses to read.
Scan and classify
The detection engine matches vendors against a curated SaaS catalog, infers billing cadence from charge history, and separates subscriptions from one-off noise.
Reclaim the waste
Duplicate tools, forgotten trials, and upcoming renewals surface as findings, each with a monthly dollar figure attached, ranked by what they cost you.
Platform
Built to read messy ledgers, not clean ones.
What does ShadowLedger read from an accounting export?
Vendor names, charge amounts, and dates from your transaction lines, and nothing else. Real accounting exports are noisy: PayPal prefixes, retail Amazon next to AWS, negative-sign bank debits. The engine is built for that.
Every payment rail, not one card
Card-native tools only see spend on their own card. Your books record everything: ACH, checks, bill pay, annual invoices, reimbursed personal cards. If it hit the ledger, it’s in the audit.
Cadence inference
Monthly or annual billing is inferred from the charge history itself. Even a single charge gets a projected renewal window from catalog term data, flagged as suspected until confirmed.
Findings that pay for themselves
Upcoming renewals, trial-to-paid conversions, and duplicate-category tools are surfaced with estimated monthly waste, so the first thing you cancel covers the subscription.
Live QuickBooks or Xero sync
Connect a company through QuickBooks Online or Xero’s own OAuth and re-scan on demand. Syncs run as background jobs, tokens are encrypted at rest, and ShadowLedger only ever reads your books, never writes to them.
Pricing
Start free. Upgrade when it pays off.
What does a software spend audit cost?
Nothing to run your first one. It is free and complete: every finding, every dollar figure. Pro exists for teams that want this running continuously.
Scan as often as you like; keep one full report. No card required.
- Upload a CSV export from any accounting tool
- Full detection engine: vendors, cadence, findings
- One complete stored report, every dollar figure
- Unlimited audit previews after that
or $490/year, 2 months free
Continuous discovery for a single company’s books.
- Unlimited scans and full scan history
- Live QuickBooks Online or Xero sync (we only ever read)
- Weekly scheduled background re-scans
- CSV, Markdown & HTML report exports
- Encrypted token storage
Audits one company, not a client book. Firms start here.
Start with Pro4-client minimum ($60/mo)
For bookkeepers and accountants running audits across a client book.
- Everything in Pro, for every client
- Client workspaces with per-client scans and reports
- White-labeled reports with your logo
- Billed only for the clients that found something
Running more than 25 clients? Ask about volume pricing.
See ShadowLedger for firmsQuestions
What people ask before connecting a ledger.
What is a zombie subscription?
A recurring charge for a tool nobody uses anymore. It keeps billing because the card or the ACH mandate is still authorized and nobody remembers who set it up. In a general ledger it shows up as a vendor charging on a steady cadence with no offsetting activity.
Why can't a corporate card tool see all of my software spend?
A card tool can only see transactions on its own card. Software paid by ACH transfer, paper check, bill pay, an annual invoice, or a reimbursed personal card never touches it. Those rails are usually where the largest annual contracts sit. A general ledger records all of them.
Does ShadowLedger work with Xero?
Yes. QuickBooks Online and Xero can both be connected read-only through their own OAuth flows. Any other system reaches ShadowLedger through a CSV export.
Do I have to switch my corporate card or bank?
No. ShadowLedger reads accounting data and issues nothing. There is no card to adopt, no bank to move, no browser extension, and no agent installed on anyone's laptop.
Can ShadowLedger tell me which employees are actually using a tool?
No, and no tool that reads a general ledger can. A ledger records what was paid, not who logged in. ShadowLedger reports duplicate tools, charges that have run unchanged for months, price increases, and upcoming renewals. Seat-level usage requires a different data source.
How do accounting firms use this with clients?
A firm connects a client book with accountant-level access, runs the audit, and hands the client a findings report carrying the firm's logo and a prepared-by line. It is a billable deliverable rather than a dashboard the client has to log into.
What data does ShadowLedger read, and can it change anything?
Read-only access to transaction and vendor data. The OAuth scopes requested do not permit writes. See the security page for the full data-handling detail.
What does it find besides software?
Recurring vendor spend in five named families: insurance, telecom, utilities, memberships, and merchant or processor fees. These appear in their own report section with their own subtotal and are excluded from the recoverable software-spend figure.
Can I connect my own AI assistant to ShadowLedger?
Yes, on the Pro and Firm plans. You create a token in Settings and give it to an assistant you already run, which can then read your audit data and, if you mark the token writable, snooze and dismiss findings and edit vendor notes. It cannot reach your accounting system: that connection stays read-only. A token is revocable, and every change an assistant makes is recorded as having come from one.
More on the vocabulary in the software spend glossary, or read why corporate card tools miss subscriptions.
See what’s hiding in your ledger.
One CSV export. One free audit. Every hidden subscription, priced.
Run your free audit