In previous articles we saw how management control is a fundamental lever for a startup from the earliest phases, and what risks you run when it gets neglected. But when you move from theory to practice, a critical point emerges immediately: cost management.

Because without a precise view of what is being spent, everything else loses effectiveness. And the problem is not just organisational. Even in startups that are already structured, it is surprisingly easy to lose control: costs fragment, responsibilities blur, and small, apparently irrelevant expenses silently pile up until they become a real burden.

The real problem, then, is not so much “controlling costs” as managing to have structured visibility over them. And that is exactly where you need to start.

Best practice #1: Centralise the information

The first step is seeing. Having all costs collected in a single space is the necessary condition for building an overall view and making conscious decisions.

You might think this job belongs to accounting. In reality, accounting has two important limits: it is designed for insiders, so it is not very immediate for those who have to make operational choices, and it is not real-time, but always reflects a past situation. This means many inefficiencies only emerge after the fact: duplicated costs, subscriptions never cancelled, billing errors discovered only when the invoice is recorded, weeks or months later.

That is why it is useful to place alongside accounting a cost map that is up to date and accessible, allowing continuous monitoring. An effective map does not just list the expenses, it makes them legible and analysable: which areas absorb the most budget, where investments concentrate, where there is room for optimisation.

Centralising does not just mean collecting data in one place, but making it genuinely useful for those who have to decide.

Best practice #2: Classify costs in a useful way

Once the data is collected, you need to be able to interpret it, and not just those who work in administration or finance, but everyone who makes operational decisions.

Accounting classification, on its own, is often not enough. Chart-of-accounts entries are born from fiscal and administrative needs: they tend to aggregate very different items, making it hard to understand the real weight or purpose of an expense. Under the same “software” entry you can find tools fundamental to the business, tools barely used, forgotten trials and duplicated services. From the accounting point of view they are all equivalent; from the management point of view their value is completely different.

It is therefore useful to introduce classifications built on the company’s real needs, striking the right balance: too generic and they don’t help, too granular and they become impossible to maintain. The goal is to make costs legible and comparable, to understand which ones are generating value and where, instead, you can optimise.

Among all the categories, the hardest to keep under control is often recurring costs, licences, subscriptions, SaaS tools, precisely because they are automatic, spread over time and managed by different teams.

Best practice #3: Monitor recurring costs

SaaS software looks harmless. And yet, even in companies with structured management control, there is almost always some tool that “gets lost along the way”.

Unlike more visible costs such as employees, rents or consultants, software renewals are automatic and fragmented: activated directly by teams, paid with different cards, often without a centralised view. The most common problems are always the same: trials started “temporarily” and never cancelled, duplicated tools used by different teams for the same activity, automatic upgrades from plan changes or growing seat counts, inactive licences never removed after an employee leaves.

Today any company uses dozens of different tools, and it is often hard to know precisely how many are actually active (try it and see). Multiplied by teams, seats and months of activation, even costs of 10 or 20 euros a month can quickly become a significant burden.

The main problem is that a dedicated moment for periodic review rarely exists. Even an Excel file or a Notion table can be useful at the start, but it hardly holds over time: by the moment you finish updating it, the situation has already changed. Someone has activated a new tool, changed a plan, added new seats.

It is exactly from this need, born first of all internally, that we developed Kontai. The idea comes from a very concrete problem: finally having a clear, up-to-date and centralised view of the company’s recurring expenses. Kontai uses artificial intelligence to automatically capture, structure and connect payments, renewals, licences and information linked to the software the company uses and to all its active services, reducing operational chaos and increasing visibility on recurring costs.

Best practice #4: Define responsibilities and review moments

For recurring expenses not to grow unchecked along with the company, it is fundamental to establish ownership and review cadences.

For every active tool there should be someone able to answer four questions: why it exists, who uses it, how much it costs, whether it is still needed. Without ownership there is no control, and without control it is very hard to optimise.

In early-stage startups this responsibility often falls on the founder, CEO or CFO. In more structured companies it can be distributed to team managers, while keeping centralised supervision. What matters is that it belongs to someone, because the real problem is not the activation of a cost, but its persistence over time: tools get switched on for a real need, then nobody checks usage, usefulness or budget impact any more.

That is why it is important to build regular review moments into the processes, monthly or quarterly, to check active licences, the real usage of the tools, the seats still needed, any duplicates and possible more efficient alternatives.

Cost control should not happen only in moments of crisis. It should be a continuous activity, integrated into normal management control. Because controlling costs means making growth more sustainable over time.

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Startup Bakery is the Italian startup studio specialised in creating B2B SaaS companies with Artificial Intelligence. We offer aspiring Co-Founders the opportunity to develop a business idea. We create investment opportunities for Professional Investors. We help companies in their innovation process.