What's your school actually paying for, twice?

The business manager pulled the spreadsheet up on the projector. Eighty-seven licences. Forty-one different platforms. Total annual spend a number high enough that the room went quiet. The principal's first question was reasonable: "How many of these are doing the same job?"

Nobody in the room could answer that question with confidence. They knew the SIS sent attendance data to the LMS and to the wellbeing platform. They thought the comms tool overlapped with the SIS comms module, but the head of digital learning wasn't sure. They knew Operoo handled some of the wellbeing function, but Engage Wellbeing was paid for separately because pastoral care liked the dashboard. They had three platforms that could send a parent push notification. They could not retire any of them without an argument that nobody had time to have.

This is the tool sprawl problem, and almost every school I have walked into has it. So we built a small browser tool that walks through it.

What the tool does

You tick the platforms your school uses. Compass, Sentral, OneSchool, Synergetic, Schoolbox, SEQTA, Konnective, Operoo, ELMO, Xero, MYOB, the lot. There is a custom field at the end for anything we missed. Each platform has a declared set of capabilities (attendance, reporting, communications, pedagogy, wellbeing, finance, LMS, HR, professional learning, compliance, workplacements). When you tick more than one platform that covers the same capability, the tool flags the overlap.

Then it tries something most spreadsheets don't. It picks, from each overlap, the cheapest paid platform involved and adds that to a "could be retired" list. That list is the rough answer to the principal's question. Not the final answer. The rough one.

The figure is capped at sixty per cent of total annual spend. Schools rarely retire more than half a stack at once, and a tool that says "you can save 90 per cent" is a tool that is lying to you. If the cap kicks in, you will see it.

Why this matters more than it looks

Tool sprawl is not just a cost problem. It is a data problem dressed up as a cost problem.

Every duplicate platform multiplies the surface area of "where does this number come from". When attendance lives in the SIS and also gets exported into the LMS daily and also gets typed into a wellbeing dashboard once a fortnight, the school has three different versions of attendance, all slightly out of sync, all defended by the team that owns each platform. The cost of those licences is real. The cost of those silent inconsistencies is bigger.

When a parent updates their phone number in the parent portal, the question of whether that number reaches the absence app, the comms platform, the canteen ordering system and the wellbeing tool within seven days is a real one. The honest answer in most schools is "we hope so". The answer changes when the school has fewer places for the number to live.

So the tool sprawl audit is partly a consolidation prompt, and partly a data lineage prompt. Both are worth your time.

What you do with the result

If the result says you have three to five overlapping platforms and a likely retire-candidate list of $20K to $40K per year, do not retire anything that week. Do this instead.

Pick one overlap. Probably the smallest paid platform on the retire-candidate list. Walk into the team that uses it most heavily and ask them, in person, what they use it for that the alternative platform cannot do. Listen. About a third of the time the team will list functions that turn out to also exist in the alternative, because nobody trained them on it. About a third of the time the team will list functions that genuinely don't exist anywhere else, in which case the platform stays. About a third of the time you will find the platform was bought by someone who left the school in 2023, used by no one, and renewed by autopilot.

That last third is the cheap win. The tool gives you the ranked list. You give the conversation.

The disclaimer that earns the rest

Costs in the tool are indicative list prices for a typical 800-student secondary school. Your numbers will vary with band, modules, and negotiated discounts. Overlap detection is based on each platform's declared capabilities, not a usage analysis. A platform showing as redundant might still be the right one to keep once you look at how staff actually use it.

Treat the output as a prompt for a real conversation, not a final answer. The point of the tool is to give the principal something concrete to ask the business manager, and the business manager something concrete to take into procurement. Both of those are in shorter supply than spreadsheets.

The audit lives at digitalattitudes.com.au/tools/tool-sprawl-audit. Free, no sign-in, no sales call.

If your number comes back honest and uncomfortable, that is the kind of useful you wanted.