A SaaS renewal calendar template you can copy

If you want to track SaaS renewals without buying software, a Google Sheet does the job for about 10 subs. Past that, the maintenance overhead starts outrunning the value — but you won't know that until you've actually tried the spreadsheet version. This is the template to start with.

Copy everything below into a blank Google Sheet. Fill it in. Add the alert dates to your calendar. That's the whole setup.

The template

Vendor | Plan | Cycle | Cost | Renewal date | Owner | Category | Notes

Sample rows to copy into your sheet (edit, don't keep):

Figma         | Organization | monthly  | $45     | 2026-05-25 | Anna   | Design         | 24 seats
Notion        | Team         | yearly   | $192    | 2027-01-15 | James  | Productivity   | check if duplicate of Notion Plus
Slack         | Pro          | monthly  | $248.75 | 2026-05-06 | Priya  | Comms          | renew annual at next cycle
AWS           | Business     | monthly  | $1,240  | 2026-05-01 | Tom    | Infrastructure | reserved instances?
Zoom          | Business     | monthly  | $219.90 | 2026-05-11 | Priya  | Comms          | overlap with Google Meet?
acme.studio   | Domain       | yearly   | $38     | 2026-05-08 | Anna   | Infrastructure | renew for 2 years next time

Eight columns, no formulas. You don't need more than this to run a renewal cadence for a 10–30 person team.

What each column does

Vendor. The company, not the product. "Atlassian," not "Jira Cloud." Lets you sort alphabetically and spot two subs from the same vendor (a common source of duplicates).

Plan. The specific tier. "Team," "Business," "Enterprise." Matters when you're deciding whether you can downgrade.

Cycle. Monthly or yearly. Determines which alert schedule applies.

Cost. In native currency. Don't convert. You want the number that actually hits your card.

Renewal date. For monthlies, the day of the month the charge lands. For annuals, the full date of the next charge. If you're not sure, check the last invoice.

Owner. A real human at your company. Not "IT." Not "the team." The person who would feel bad if the tool got canceled without warning.

Category. Pick from a consistent taxonomy — we use Design, Engineering, Infrastructure, Productivity, Comms, Finance, Marketing, Ops, AI Tooling, and a few more. Sort by this column to find duplicates.

Notes. Free-form. Things you want to remember at the next review. "Check if duplicate," "renew annual at next cycle," "24 seats, probably only 18 active."

The alert schedule

For each annual subscription in the sheet, create four Google Calendar events:

• 30 days before renewal
• 15 days before renewal
• 7 days before renewal
• 1 day before renewal

Event title: Review {vendor} renewal — $X on {date}. Invite the owner. Set email reminders on each.

For monthly subscriptions, one 3-day reminder is enough. The four-window schedule is overkill for something renewing every 30 days; it exists specifically for annuals, where missing the cancel window costs you 12 months of spend instead of one.

Budget 45 seconds per annual subscription to set up the calendar events. For 20 annuals, that's 15 minutes. Do it in one sitting.

The quarterly review

Add a recurring 60-minute calendar block: "SaaS audit."

What to review:

• Every sub that renewed this quarter. Was it worth keeping?
• Every alert that fired without action. Why?
• Every new sub someone added. Does it overlap with one you already have?
• Top five subs by cost. Can any be downgraded?

The quarterly review is the forcing function that keeps the sheet accurate. Without it, the sheet goes stale in about eight weeks.

When this stops working

Around 20 active subscriptions, the calendar-invite-per-sub approach starts to feel like a job in itself. The review takes an hour instead of 20 minutes. Someone sets up a new tool and you find out at the next review, not the week it happened.

When you hit that wall, the options are:

• A dedicated tracker (ours or others). The alerts, duplicate flags, and budget ceilings happen automatically. You still add each sub manually — same mental model, no maintenance.
• A SaaS management platform (Cledara, Substly). Auto-discovery via card feeds or Gmail. More setup, more moving parts in your security review, but it finds subs you forgot.
• Staying on the spreadsheet and hiring someone for finance. Some teams prefer this. Tools don't fix process problems.

There's no single right answer. What breaks first for most small teams is the maintenance cadence, not the sheet itself.

Closing

The spreadsheet isn't a placeholder for "real" finance software. For 10–30 person teams, the sheet IS the real software, and the failure mode is skipping the quarterly review, not missing a feature.

If you want the longer background on the four-window schedule and why each window matters, the full renewal-tracking guide covers it step by step.