Last week I went looking for a simple answer to a simple question. A client is billed for Google Workspace across several related businesses, and I wanted to know how much of it to pass on to which entity. Half an hour, I thought.

The bank statement said Google had taken three payments that month. The businesses had six Workspace tenants.

So three of the six were being paid by somebody else, on a card nobody had written down. Nobody had done anything wrong. It had simply happened the way these things happen: a business gets set up, whoever is standing there puts a card in, and three years later nobody remembers whose card it was.

That would be a harmless bit of admin, except for what I found next to it in my own notes. One of those tenants had been suspended for a failed payment a few weeks earlier and reactivated the same day. Another had payment failures still showing as unresolved.

A suspended Workspace tenant means no email. Not slow email. No email, for everyone in that business, until someone with the right login fixes the billing.

Why nobody notices

Software billing goes wrong quietly. There is no alert, no ticket, nothing on a dashboard. The sequence usually runs like this.

A card expires or gets replaced after a fraud alert. The payment fails. Google, or Microsoft, or whoever, sends a notice to the billing contact on the account. That contact is often an address nobody reads any more: the person who set it up and has since left, a generic admin@ that forwards nowhere, or an account created before the business had a proper email domain.

The notices keep arriving. Nobody sees them. Then one morning the service stops.

The gap between "the payment failed" and "the business has no email" is usually a few weeks. Plenty of time to fix it, if anyone knew.

Four questions worth an hour of your time

None of this needs a consultant. You can answer all four yourself, and the answers tend to be more interesting than people expect.

1. What is actually leaving your account?

Open your bank statement or accounting software and search the last three months for your major vendors. Google, Microsoft, Adobe, Xero, Dropbox, whatever you run on.

Do not look at the total. Look at the number of separate charges and whether it is the same each month. If your business has three Microsoft 365 tenants and you only see two charges, the third is on somebody's personal card and you have just found something worth knowing.

2. Who is the billing contact on each service?

Log into each admin console and find the billing section. There will be an email address on it. Ask yourself honestly whether anyone reads that mailbox today.

This is the single most common failure I see. The technical setup is fine. The billing notices go to someone who left in 2023.

3. Whose card is on file?

Same screen, usually. Look at the last four digits. If it is a personal card belonging to a director or an employee, that is a business continuity problem wearing a bookkeeping costume. When that person leaves, or the card is reissued, the service stops.

4. What are you paying for that nobody uses?

While you are in there, count the licences against the people who actually work there. I audited one client's Microsoft licensing recently and found a disabled account still holding three paid licences, a duplicate licence on one person, and shared mailboxes carrying licences they do not need. Around $90 a month, quietly.

That is not a disaster. It is $1,080 a year for nothing, and it took twenty minutes to find.

The fix is boring, which is why it works

There is no product to buy here. The fix is a decision about who owns the account.

One billing identity per business. A business email address on the business's own domain, not a person's, and not a personal Gmail.
A business card or direct debit, not an individual's card.
The billing notices going somewhere a human reads, which in practice means a shared mailbox or a help desk, not an alias that forwards into the void.
A list. One page, one row per service: what it is, which business it belongs to, who is billed, what it costs, who the vendor contact is. It does not need to be sophisticated. It needs to exist.

If you manage several related businesses, do this per entity rather than for the group. It is the only way the recharges come out right at the end of the year, and it stops one business quietly funding another's software.

What I would do first

Pick the one service your business genuinely cannot operate without for a day. For most people that is email.

Log into its admin console, look at the billing contact and the card on file, and ask whether both of those would still work if the person who set it up walked out tomorrow. If the answer is no, that is your afternoon sorted, and you have removed a real risk rather than a theoretical one.

Then do the next one next month. It is not urgent work. It is just work that nobody ever gets around to until the day it becomes extremely urgent.

If you would rather someone else went through it with you, that is part of what I do for managed clients: one list of every service, who is billed for it, what it costs and where the notices go. Happy to take a look at yours either way. You can get in touch, or run the free security check first if you want to see what your domain looks like from the outside before we talk about anything else.

Who is actually paying for your software?