What does your business pay for that nobody uses?

The summer before I joined CoSell, I interned at a small design agency. In my second week, someone asked me to tidy up a spreadsheet of the company's subscriptions. I thought it would take an hour. It took most of a day, mostly because every second line ended in the same conversation.

"What's this one?"
"No idea. Ask whoever set it up."
"Who set it up?"
"...good question."

I don't think they were unusual. I suspect most businesses have a few things they pay for every month that nobody has looked at in a long time. Not because anyone is careless, but because a payment that works quietly never asks for attention. It only gets noticed when it stops.

So here's an exercise I've grown oddly fond of. Take last month's bank statement and read it slowly, as if you'd never seen it before. For every line, ask two questions. What is this? And when did someone last actually use it?

The answers tend to fall into a few groups.

The forgotten subscriptions. Software seats for people who left, tools bought for a project that ended, a premium plan someone upgraded to for one feature, once. These are the easy ones. Cancel them and move on.

The space. The storage unit with things nobody would miss. The second meeting room. The corner of the warehouse that's been "temporary" for so long it has its own personality. The parking spaces you lease for staff who now work from home three days a week.

The equipment. Leased machines, vans, printers, a professional camera bought for one shoot. Still paid for, still insured, mostly still.

The things you paid to create. This is the group people miss, because it isn't on the statement anymore. The photography library from the rebrand. The research report that cost a small fortune and was read by six people. The training course you built and stopped selling. The newsletter list from a product you no longer make. You paid for these once, and they're still sitting there, finished and good, waiting for a second life.

Here's where it gets interesting. Some of these should simply be cancelled. But some of them aren't really costs at all. They're things that are valuable to someone, just not to you right now.

The storage unit full of display stands might be exactly what a small brand needs for its first trade show. The camera might be someone's whole first business. The research report might be precisely what a consultant in your industry would pay to license. The meeting room that sits empty after lunch might be the best thing that happens to a two-person team working out of a noisy café.

The difference between a cost and an asset, it turns out, is often just whether anyone knows it exists.

I'd suggest doing the bank statement exercise with a pen and two columns. Cancel, and Someone else might want this. The first column saves you money. The second is where it gets more fun, because nobody can tell you what's in it until you ask.

That spreadsheet at the agency ended with nine cancellations and one very nice light box nobody remembered buying. It went back in a cupboard. I still think about who might have wanted it.

What would end up in your second column?