Why a cost baseline that finance co-signs beats every vendor quote

Every month, money leaves for your software vendors. It gets paid, booked and forgotten. The question that rarely reaches the table is not whether the invoice is correct, but whether you still use what you pay for, and what that amount becomes over five years if no one steps in. An IT FinOps baseline answers that: a figure per cost line, with a source behind it, carried by finance and IT together.

There is reason to ask that question. The Flexera 2024 State of ITAM report shows that organisations waste an estimated 20% to 30% of their IT spend. That same report finds that more than half of SaaS licences go unused. On a software budget of any size, a fifth to a third is exactly the amount a board debates for a year, while all that time it simply drains away.

A quote is not a baseline

Anyone who wants a grip on software costs often asks a vendor for a proposal. It feels like a figure, but it is a sales document. A quote starts from what the supplier wants to sell, not from what you pay and use today. It shows the price of the alternative, not the truth about your current state. You cannot renegotiate with it, because it comes from the party on the other side of the table.

A baseline works the other way around. It starts from your own invoices and contracts, adds up what actually runs, and sets that against usage. The result sells nothing. That is why it holds up against a critical question from the CFO, the accountant or a new integrator. A quote does not survive that question, because it was never meant to.

What a defensible baseline contains

A figure is only a baseline when it can be traced to its source. That takes more than an export from the accounts. Four properties separate a baseline that carries a decision from an estimate that collapses at the first counter-question.

• Traceable: every line refers to an invoice or a contract, not to an assumption.
• Complete: licences, infrastructure, support, maintenance and hidden parallel running are all in it.
• Over time: at least 24 months, so renewals, indexations and peak months become visible instead of being averaged away.
• Linked to usage: next to what you pay stands how much of it is actually used.

Per user or per infrastructure

The form of your cost model determines how the invoice moves with your business. The classic licence model charges per user. Every new head, every module and every indexation pushes the amount up, regardless of the value you get back. An infrastructure model charges for compute, storage and traffic. That cost is publicly priced and can be optimised, but it also creeps up if no one watches it. In the Flexera 2025 State of the Cloud report, 84% of organisations name managing cloud costs their biggest cloud challenge, with an average budget overrun of 17%. A baseline makes visible in both models where the money goes, so you choose the model and the model does not choose you.

Beyond the model, there is money in overlap. According to BetterCloud, an average company used roughly 106 SaaS applications in 2024. At that number, parallel running is not an exception but a rule: a CRM with built-in ticketing next to a separate ticketing package, three tools that each manage a piece of inventory, a BI licence per department. Every contract is renewed separately and no one puts the invoices side by side. That is part of why more than half of SaaS licences go unused, as the Flexera 2024 State of ITAM report finds. The baseline does put those invoices side by side, and the overlap surfaces on the line where it sits.

TCO over five years, not today's price

A monthly figure says little about the cost of a choice. Software lives for years, and the bill grows with indexations, extra users, renewals and migrations you do not yet see today. A usable baseline therefore projects every route over five years, with the cash flow per year kept separate. The scenario in which you change nothing fundamental and optimise what you already have belongs there too, backed up just as firmly as a replacement. That way you compare routes on figures over the full term, not on a price that happens to look low today.

Why finance co-signs

A baseline drawn up by IT alone stays a technical document. If the vendor draws it up, it stays a sales document. Only once finance co-signs does it become an internal fact. Finance guards completeness and source: is every line traceable, is everything in it, does the sum add up. IT guards whether the scope tracks with the architecture, where the data sits, which connections are critical, and what removing a line touches technically. Those two views together make the figure defensible. If only one of them carries it, it collapses at the first counter-question.

From baseline to decision

You can build that baseline yourself, with your controller, your IT lead and enough discipline to work through 24 months of invoices. If that does not fit alongside the daily operation, an IT FinOps audit gets you there in four weeks: fixed price, vendor-neutral, and a baseline that your finance co-signs. No licence selling, no sales afterwards, usable with or without us. What comes next, renegotiating, optimising internally or replacing in a targeted way, you decide on a figure that holds up. That is the difference between costs you undergo and costs you steer.