Worked example: the software budget for a 15-person company

This is a worked example, not a customer story. The company below is invented. Every line item in it is one that a real B2B services company of this size has to budget for, and the point of the exercise is the shape of the bill rather than the total — because the shape is what you can act on.

The company

• Fifteen people: four in sales, six delivering client work, two in finance and administration, three in management.
• B2B services, sold on contracts, invoiced monthly.
• Works in Polish and English, with clients in both.
• One person who is "good with computers" and is not an IT administrator.

The line items everybody remembers

1. Email, calendar and files. The office suite. Usually the single largest line, because it is the only one where every person needs a seat.
2. Team chat. Either bundled with the suite or bought separately.
3. CRM. Sales seats, and only sales seats — see below.
4. Work tracking. Delivery team, plus management visibility.
5. Accounting and invoicing. One or two seats, plus access for the accounting office.
6. E-signature. Contracts with clients. Priced per user or per document depending on the vendor, and that choice matters more than the headline rate.

The line items everybody forgets

• A password manager. Cheap, and the only thing standing between you and a shared spreadsheet of logins.
• Backup of the SaaS itself. Your provider protects against their failure, not against your deletion.
• The accountant's seat. Frequently billed, frequently forgotten until the first invoice.
• Meter overages. E-signature envelopes, email sends, storage, automation runs.
• Seats belonging to people who left. Annual contracts often do not let the number go down mid-term. Audit this before every renewal.
• Per-seat minimums, which can double the entry price for a small department.
• The plan you will really be on. Almost nobody stays on the entry tier for a year.

How to build the number

1. Count seats by role, not by headcount. Six delivery people do not need CRM seats. Four sales people do not need the accounting system. This single discipline is usually the largest saving available, and it is free.
2. Pick the plan you will actually be on, not the one in the headline. If you know you need single sign-on or a permission model, price that plan from the start.
3. Add the meters. Estimate documents signed per month, emails sent, storage used. Then find the overage rate.
4. Multiply by twelve, then compare annual against monthly billing. The discount for annual is real and so is the commitment.
5. Add a one-off implementation line for data migration and configuration, even when you are doing it yourselves — the internal hours are the largest hidden cost in a small company.
6. Add a named contingency. Seat counts drift upward and plans get upgraded mid-year. Naming the line stops the drift from being a surprise.

Where the money actually goes

In an example like this one, the proportions are more stable than the totals. The office suite that carries mail, calendar and files is normally the biggest single line, because it is the only universal one. Chat is either free with it or a modest addition. The CRM is smaller than people expect, because only four people need it. Work tracking is similar. Accounting and e-signature are small lines with the sharpest overage risk — an e-signature plan priced per envelope can go from trivial to noticeable in one busy contracting month.

The seat count, not the price per seat, is what you actually control. Vendors negotiate on the second and never on the first.

Three decisions that moved the number most

1. Not buying CRM seats for the delivery team. They needed to see two fields on an account, which a read-only view or a weekly export handled. The instinct to give everyone everything is what turns a four-seat purchase into a fifteen-seat one.
2. Choosing the e-signature pricing model against real volume. Per-user pricing suits a company where two people send a lot of documents. Per-document pricing suits one where many people send a few. Count last year before you choose. Autenti and Docusign both sit in our e-signature category, and both are worth pricing against your actual contract count.
3. Deciding about single sign-on deliberately. It is routinely on a higher plan and it is a security control rather than a luxury. The right answer is either to pay for it or to write down why you are not — the wrong answer is to discover the price at renewal, when the migration cost is already sunk. We wrote about that pattern in free plan or free trial.

What this example would not cut

• Accounting software that matches the company's tax situation. ifirma and the rest of the accounting and invoicing category are cheap relative to the cost of getting a filing wrong.
• Anything that keeps access hygiene working: password management, and a way to remove someone on their last day.
• Export and backup. The cheapest line on the list and the only one that protects everything else.

Review it once a year, in the same month

Put a recurring calendar entry in a quiet month. Pull every subscription invoice, list the seats, and ask three questions per tool: who uses it, what would break without it, and when does it renew. Most companies of this size find at least one tool nobody has opened in six months, and at least one seat billed for someone who left.

The products named above are examples from our catalogue rather than a recommended stack — Pipedrive, Asana, Microsoft Teams and Slack each fit a different company. Build your own list from the CRM, project management and team communication categories and price it on your own seat counts.