About
ShadowLedger reads a company’s accounting ledger and reports the recurring software spend nobody is watching. It is built by John Dorn, one person, alongside a day job.
Why read the ledger instead of the card?
Because the ledger is the only record with no hole in it. A corporate card platform sees the charges authorized on its own cards, which is a real dataset and a closed one. Software paid by ACH transfer, paper check, bill pay, or annual invoice never reaches it. Those rails are where the large negotiated contracts settle, so the spend that escapes a card tool is skewed toward the contracts most worth reviewing. The argument in full is in why corporate card tools miss subscriptions.
Every payment a company makes has to land in the books, because that is what bookkeeping is for. Starting there means an audit needs no card to be issued, no agent installed on anyone’s laptop, no browser extension, and no change to how anybody buys things. A CSV export is enough to begin, and a read-only connection to QuickBooks Online or Xero is enough to keep it current.
What a ledger cannot tell you
Who is using a tool, or whether anyone is. A ledger records what was paid, not who logged in. No amount of work on accounting data produces seat-level usage, and any product claiming both from this one source is overstating what the source contains.
That boundary is worth stating on the page rather than discovering in a sales call. ShadowLedger reports duplicate tools, charges that have run unchanged for months, price increases, and upcoming renewals. If what you need is license reclaim driven by login activity, a general ledger is the wrong data source and this is the wrong product.
Who builds it
John Dorn. A computer science background with a software engineering concentration, and several years of identity, endpoint, and systems integration work: OAuth and single sign-on flows, REST integrations between systems that were never designed to talk to each other, and the automation that sits underneath them. ShadowLedger is the same kind of problem, which is most of why it exists: a company’s spend is already written down in a system nobody queries that way.
There is no team and no outside funding. There are no customers yet either, which is why nothing on this site quotes a savings average or a testimonial. When there are numbers worth publishing, they will be the engine’s own output over real books, the way the figures on the demo page are the engine’s output over a sample one.
John Dorn on LinkedIn, or get in touch directly. Questions about data handling are answered on the security page.