Glossary
Recurring vendor spend
Any charge that repeats on a steady cadence, whether or not it is software. Insurance premiums, telecom lines, utilities, memberships, and merchant or processor fees all behave the same way in a ledger, and all drift for the same reasons.
Why look past software?
Because the pattern that finds a forgotten SaaS tool is the same pattern that finds a phone line for an office that closed. A charge recurring at a stable amount with nothing referencing it is worth a question regardless of what the vendor sells. For a business whose books are mostly trades, construction, property, or food service, this is where the recoverable money actually sits.
Should software and non-software be counted together?
No, and keeping them apart matters. ShadowLedger reports non-software recurring spend in its own section with its own subtotal, and excludes it from the recoverable software figure. Blending them inflates the headline number and makes the whole report harder to trust, which costs more than the larger figure gains.
Every term in this glossary is defined from the general ledger, because that is the one place a company's whole software estate is already written down. See how a software spend audit reads a ledger for what that involves.