One Login, Twelve Apps: Cutting the Point-Solution Sprawl

Count the software your company pays for. Not the big ones. All of them.

Estimating. Project or job management. Scheduling. Time tracking. Safety. Accounting. Payroll. Fleet or GPS. Document storage. The equipment app. The one the insurance carrier requires. The one somebody signed up for in 2023 that three people still use.

Most owners get to a number that surprises them. Each one was a sensible decision by itself. Together they are the reason your crew groans when you announce another rollout.

Sprawl costs more than the subscriptions

The monthly total is the smallest part.

Every app is a login, and every login is a support call. Password resets are the most common IT request in almost every business. Twelve systems with twelve separate accounts guarantees a steady stream of them.

Your data ends up in pieces. When labor lives in one system, job costs in another and field activity in a third, nobody can answer simple questions without exporting things into a spreadsheet. Owners end up making decisions on numbers that are a week old because assembling current ones takes a day.

Adoption gets harder every time. This is the compounding one. Firms are not just resisting new tools, they are exhausted by them. Which means the next system you buy, even if it is genuinely better, inherits the resistance built by the previous four.

Nobody knows who still has access. Someone who left eighteen months ago probably still has a login to at least one of these. Small systems are exactly the ones that get missed at offboarding, because they were never on anyone’s list.

The cleanup, in a sensible order

Inventory it honestly. Pull the last twelve months of card and bank statements and list every software charge. Not what you think you use. What you pay for. Expect surprises: duplicates from different departments, and at least one subscription for something you stopped doing.

Mark each one essential, overlapping, or dead. Dead ones cancel today. Overlapping ones are the real work. Two systems that both do scheduling means somebody chose differently at some point, and one of them should win.

Check what you already own before buying anything. This is where most companies find money. If you have Microsoft 365, you already have file storage, video calls, chat, basic task management, forms and simple automation. Companies routinely pay for separate products that duplicate things already sitting in a license they bought.

Consolidate the logins you keep. Most business software can sign in with your Microsoft account instead of its own password. That means one account to create, one to disable when someone leaves, and one password for your team to remember. It is the single highest-value change in this article and it is mostly configuration rather than purchase.

Then reduce the count. Once you know what overlaps, retiring one system per quarter is realistic. Faster than that and you are running three migrations at once, which is how people end up hating all of it.

What good looks like

Not one system. That is a fantasy sold by whoever wants to be the one system.

Good looks like a small number of tools each doing a job properly, signed into with one company account, with the important ones connected to each other so the same job is not typed in twice.

For most companies that lands somewhere around five or six systems rather than twelve. Fewer logins, fewer resets, fewer arguments, and a much better chance the next thing you introduce actually gets used.

Where to start Monday

Do the statement review. It takes an hour and you cannot make any other decision here without it.

Almost everyone who does it finds at least one subscription they forgot they had, and usually two systems doing the same job. That is the cleanup paying for itself before you have changed anything.

Related reading

• Why your crew won’t use the software you bought
• Microsoft 365 management
• Co-managed IT services