StackTrackr is a B2B SaaS tool that tracks your company's software estate - renewals, cancellation deadlines, termination clauses, ownership and contracts - and emails automated alerts before every deadline.

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Yes. The Starter plan is free forever for one user and up to 10 tracked tools, with no credit card required. Every new account also gets a 14-day trial of the Growth plan.

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Each paid plan has a base price covering a set number of users, then a small per-extra-user rate - billed monthly or annually (annual is two months free). Team is £8/mo for up to 3 users then £4/user (25 tools); Growth is £15/mo for up to 5 users then £3/user (50 tools); Scale is £30/mo for up to 10 users then £2/user (unlimited tools); Business is custom with self-hosting and SSO. Prices also available in USD and EUR.

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Budgeting

How to calculate your SaaS contract liability (what you are still committed to)

1 August 20267 min read

Ask most teams what their software costs and you get a run rate: a monthly or annual figure covering everything currently switched on. It is a useful number. It is also the wrong answer to a question finance asks regularly, which is not "what are we spending" but "what are we committed to".

Those are different numbers, and the gap between them is the part nobody can budget for because nobody has calculated it. Here is how to work it out.

Run rate is not liability

Your run rate is what you pay per year if nothing changes. Your contract liability is what you still owe if you decide today to get out of everything: you serve notice on every tool, each one runs to the end of its current committed term, and then it stops.

For a tool you can cancel with 30 days' notice, those two numbers are almost the same, because you are only ever a month from freedom. For a tool on an annual contract with a 90-day notice period that renewed last month, they are wildly different: you are locked in for another eleven months whatever you decide, and if you miss the notice window you are locked in for twenty-three.

What you need for every tool

The calculation is simple arithmetic. Getting the inputs is the actual work. For each tool you need four things:

The cost, and the billing cycle it is charged on
The renewal date of the current term
The notice period from the termination clause
Whether it auto-renews, and whether it is a subscription or a one-off purchase

Three of those live in the contract rather than the invoice, which is why a card statement alone cannot produce this number. If you do not have them recorded yet, what to record for every subscription covers the full field list, and notice periods in SaaS contracts explains where the notice period is usually buried.

Working out the exit date for each tool

For each tool, find the date it would actually stop costing you money if you served notice today. There are two cases:

You are still before the cancellation deadline (renewal date minus notice period). You can serve notice in time, so the tool exits at the end of the current term. Its exit date is the current renewal date.
You are already past the cancellation deadline. The next renewal is going to happen whether you like it or not, so the earliest you can exit is the end of the following term. Its exit date is one full billing cycle after the current renewal date.

That second case is the one people forget, and it is the expensive one. A tool whose notice window closed last week does not cost you the rest of this year. It costs you the rest of this year plus all of next.

Once you have an exit date, the liability for that tool is its annualised cost prorated across the time between now and that date. Add up every tool and you have your total committed spend. Exclude one-off purchases: they are already paid and carry no ongoing obligation.

Liability and cashflow are also different

There is one more distinction worth making, because it changes which number you hand to which person. Liability accrues smoothly: it is the obligation counting down day by day as each contract burns off. Cash is lumpy: it leaves the bank in whole payments, on billing dates.

A tool billed annually in advance with nine months left represents nine months of liability but zero cash out until the renewal date, when a full year leaves at once. If you are answering "what are we obliged to", use liability. If you are answering "what leaves the account in Q3", use cashflow. Handing over the wrong one produces a forecast that is right in total and wrong every month.

What the number is actually for

A committed-spend figure changes three conversations:

Cost-cutting. When someone asks for a 20% reduction in software spend, the liability number tells you how much of it is even reachable this year, and by when you would have to act to reach it.
Renegotiation. Knowing you are locked in for another eleven months tells you not to open a negotiation now. Knowing a deadline is six weeks out tells you to open one today.
Due diligence. Committed contractual spend is a standard question in any funding round or sale. Producing it from a spreadsheet in a week is a bad look; producing it in an afternoon is not.

Keeping it current

The reason most teams do not have this number is not that the arithmetic is hard. It is that it goes stale immediately. Every renewal that passes, every tool added, every notice window that closes changes the answer, so a figure calculated by hand in January is fiction by March.

That is the case for holding the underlying dates in something that recalculates rather than a spreadsheet you re-derive. How to forecast software spend covers the budgeting side of the same data.

StackTrackr computes this from the register you already keep: the liability view models serving notice on everything and shows the committed spend still owed, falling to zero as each contract reaches its exit date, alongside cashflow views for the keep-running and wind-down cases, reported per currency. See the features overview, or start free and get the number without building the spreadsheet.