Renewals That All Land in January

Why they accumulate

Because each renewal is a non-decision.

Signing up requires a decision. Renewing requires nothing at all, and the charge arrives whether or not anybody thought about it.

Which means the set of things a business pays for annually reflects every decision it has ever made and none of the ones it would make now.

Several will be things nobody has used since the year they were bought.

What tends to be on the list

• Domain names, including ones bought defensively and never used.
• Hosting, sometimes for sites that no longer exist.
• Directory listings and paid memberships.
• Software subscriptions, including duplicates that do the same job.
• Email marketing tools paid for a list nobody mails.
• A retainer whose scope nobody remembers agreeing.

The fourth is the most common source of genuine waste, since businesses accumulate tools and rarely cancel the one being replaced.

Building the list

The exercise itself, which takes an evening and is the whole of what this requires.

Go through twelve months of bank and card statements and write down every recurring charge.

That is more reliable than memory, and it will turn up two or three nobody would have listed.

For each: the amount, the renewal date, what it is for, and who at the business uses it.

The last column is the revealing one, and where the answer is nobody, the decision is straightforward.

A worked example

A business that went through its statements in December for the first time.

They found eleven recurring charges, of which they could immediately account for seven.

Of the remaining four: one was a directory listing bought three years earlier that had never been reviewed, one was hosting for a landing page taken down in 2018, one was a second subscription to a tool they already paid for under a different account, and one was for software nobody could identify.

Cancelling those four saved a meaningful annual sum, none of which affected anything the business did.

The most useful outcome was not the saving but discovering that hosting was still being paid for something that no longer existed, which also meant a domain was renewing pointing at nothing.

Judging the ones that are used

Harder, and the question is what each produced.

For anything intended to bring in work, ask how many enquiries or jobs came from it in the last twelve months.

Where the answer is none and nobody can say why it should be different next year, it is a candidate.

Where the answer is unknown, that is a measurement problem worth fixing before renewing rather than a reason to continue.

And where something is genuinely necessary infrastructure, such as hosting, the question is not whether but whether the current arrangement is the right one.

The retainer

Worth its own consideration, since it is frequently the largest recurring cost and the least examined.

A monthly arrangement for website or marketing work, agreed at some point, continuing since.

The questions: what was actually done in the last twelve months, was it what the agreement covers, and was it worth the total.

Which is a reasonable thing to ask, and a supplier doing good work will have an answer readily.

What frequently emerges is that the retainer covers hosting and small changes, the small changes have been few, and the arrangement is now several times what the hosting costs.

That is not necessarily wrong, since availability has value, and it should be a decision rather than an inheritance.

The counter-case

Where keeping something with no measurable return is right.

Insurance and anything else whose value is that it exists rather than that it produces.

A defensive domain registration, which is cheap and prevents a specific problem.

Professional memberships that carry a credential or an obligation.

And backups, which produce nothing until the day they produce everything.

The distinction is between things bought to generate work, which should be judged on whether they do, and things bought to prevent a loss, which should not.

Things charged to a personal card

A category worth checking separately, since it does not appear on the business statements.

Small subscriptions frequently start on somebody's own card and are never moved across.

Which means they are invisible to any review of business spending, and they continue after the person who set them up has stopped using them or left.

They also create a problem if that person becomes unavailable, since the service is tied to an account nobody else controls.

Worth asking anybody involved in the business whether anything for work is on their own card, and moving what turns up.

Spreading the dates

A small administrative improvement worth making while you are there.

Renewals clustered in one month produce a difficult fortnight and encourage renewing without thinking, because dealing with six at once is a chore.

Several can be moved by cancelling and restarting at a different point, or by asking.

More useful: set a calendar reminder a month before each renewal, saying what it is and what it costs.

Which converts an automatic charge into a prompted decision, at a moment when there is time to make one.

What to do with the saving

Worth deciding rather than letting it disappear into the general account.

Cancelling four things produces an annual sum that was previously invisible, and it can fund something chosen deliberately.

Which for most small businesses means the things that compound: photographs, service pages, or a concentrated advertising test that was previously unaffordable.

Naming where it goes at the moment of cancelling is what stops the exercise being purely a cut.

Cancelling properly

Worth doing carefully, since a few of these have consequences.

Check what happens to data when a subscription ends, particularly for anything holding customer records or images.

Export anything worth keeping before cancelling rather than after.

Check whether anything else depends on it, since one service frequently feeds another.

And never let a domain name lapse as a way of cancelling it, since recovering one after expiry is expensive and sometimes impossible.

Domains should be transferred or deliberately released rather than allowed to run out.

The December hour

1. Go through twelve months of statements.
2. List every recurring charge.
3. Note who uses each one.
4. Ask what each produced this year.
5. Cancel anything with no answer to either.
6. Set a reminder a month before each survivor renews.

The fifth is where the money actually is, and the sixth is what stops the same exercise being necessary all over again next December.

How to judge the ones producing work is covered in knowing when to turn it off.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.