Half-Year Tech Review: 6 Fixes for Indian SMBs Before H2 FY26

Half of FY26 is gone. The RBI cut the repo rate by 50 basis points to 5.50% on 6 June 2025, GST and ITR deadlines have reshuffled, and most Indian SMBs are running the same tech stack they limped into April with. We run a half-year review for our own clients every June — six checks that take a day and routinely surface a five-figure monthly saving or a security hole nobody owned. This post is that exact review, with the checks you can run this week and a clear "fix now vs park for Q4" call on each. ## The answer in 60 words Run six checks before H2 FY26: audit SaaS spend for duplicate and idle seats; close the obvious security gaps (MFA, backups, access review); find the two manual processes worth automating; check your stack against the year's regulatory changes (GST 2.0, DPDP); reprice anything tied to the repo rate or USD; and reallocate the H2 budget toward what's actually moving the business. A day's work, often a five-figure monthly return. ## Why a mid-year review beats waiting for March Most SMBs review tech once a year, at FY-end, when everyone is buried in books and audits. By then a wasted SaaS subscription has burned twelve months and a security gap has been open just as long. June is the quiet point: the first quarter's numbers are in, the rate and tax picture for the year is clearer, and you have two quarters to act on what you find. As Vivek, our co-founder, puts it: the cheapest tech win of the year is the subscription you cancel in June instead of next March. The founder's lens here is the same one on Vivek Singh's writing about running a lean stack. ## The 6 checks — what to look at and the call to make ## Check 1 — the SaaS spend audit (start here, biggest return) Pull the last three months of card and bank statements and list every recurring software charge. You're hunting three things: two tools doing the same job, seats assigned to people who left or never used them, and monthly plans that are cheaper annually. | What to flag | How to find it | Typical fix | |---|---|---| | Duplicate tools | Two tools in the same category (two design tools, two PM tools) | Standardise on one, cancel the other | | Idle seats | Seats > active users in each tool's admin | Drop to actual headcount | | Monthly billing | Anything billed monthly you'll keep all year | Switch to annual (often 15–20% off) | | Forgotten trials | Charges you don't recognise | Cancel, or assign an owner | For the full version of this audit, see our 2025 walkthrough on a six tech buys with a 90-day payback for Indian SMBs — the same payback discipline applies to cuts, not just buys. ## Check 2 — the security gap sweep Three things catch most problems at this size, and all three are free to check.

• MFA is on for every admin account — email, banking, hosting, CRM, payment gateway
• You've actually restored a backup in the last 90 days, not just confirmed one exists
• You've reviewed who has access to what and removed everyone who left
• Your domain has SPF, DKIM, and DMARC set so your email isn't trivially spoofed
• Admin accounts use a password manager, not a shared password in a spreadsheet

## Check 3 — the two automations worth building now Don't try to automate everything. Find the two tasks your team repeats most and that follow clear rules. For most Indian SMBs the candidates are payment reconciliation, overdue-invoice reminders, and a recurring sales or stock report. Each is a contained build with a payback measured in weeks. A daily Razorpay-to-books reconciliation or an automated overdue-invoice reminder sequence are two we ship often. Our AI and automation team treats each as a fixed-scope build so you know the payback before you commit. We saw the compounding effect of this approach building Radiant Finance's back-office tooling, where small automations stacked into a materially leaner ops team. ## Check 4 — the regulatory check Two items matter most for Indian SMBs right now. - GST alignment. Confirm your invoicing and accounting software reflects this year's GST changes — rates, HSN handling, and e-invoice rules where they apply to you. A misconfigured invoice template is a slow-burning compliance risk. The monthly cadence is unforgiving: GSTR-1 and GSTR-3B deadlines arrive every month regardless of how your quarter is going. - DPDP readiness. You don't need a full compliance programme today, but you do need to know what personal data you hold, where it lives, and how you'd respond to a deletion request. Start with a one-page data inventory. ## Check 5 — repricing after the rate cut The RBI's 50bps cut to a 5.50% repo rate on 6 June 2025, with a shift to a neutral stance, has two practical effects for an SMB. Borrowing on rate-linked lines gets a touch cheaper, so revisit any working-capital facility. And fixed-deposit yields drift down, so idle cash parked in FDs earns less — worth a conversation with your bank about laddering or sweep accounts. If you export software or services, or pay vendors abroad, recheck your USD pricing against the current rupee level; a margin that worked in January may not hold now. For the treasury-side detail, see our note on the RBI MPC and a SaaS Q3 replan. ## Check 6 — reallocating the H2 budget Now act on what the first five checks surfaced. The cancelled subscriptions and the avoided headcount from automation free up budget. Point it at the one or two things the quarter showed are actually growing — a channel that's converting, a product line that's pulling, a market that's responding. The discipline is simple: every rupee you stop wasting should be consciously redeployed, not quietly reabsorbed. ## Common mistakes — when not to act on this review Mistake 1 — cancelling a tool with no replacement plan. Cutting the CRM your sales team lives in to "save money" without a migration breaks the business. Cancel duplicates and idle seats, not load-bearing systems, unless you have a tested replacement ready. Mistake 2 — automating a broken process. If a manual process is broken, automating it just produces wrong answers faster. Fix the process, then automate the fixed version. We've watched a client automate a flawed reconciliation and spend a month untangling the result. Mistake 3 — treating the rate cut as a reason to take on debt. A cheaper repo rate lowers the cost of borrowing you already need; it isn't a signal to borrow you didn't. Reprice existing lines, don't manufacture new ones. Mistake 4 — doing all six checks and acting on none. A review with no follow-through is theatre. Pick the top three fixes, assign an owner and a date to each, and put them on the calendar before you close the laptop. ## Real example — what a one-day review found We ran this review for a 60-person manufacturing-services firm in Coimbatore this past June. The SaaS audit found ₹21,000/month in duplicate and idle subscriptions, including two project tools and eleven seats for people who'd left. The security sweep found three admin accounts without MFA and a backup that had been failing for five weeks. The automation pass surfaced a daily two-hour manual reconciliation that became a 20-minute automated one. Total: a clear five-figure monthly saving plus a closed security gap, from a single day's work. The owner's reaction was the common one — surprise that it had all been sitting there in plain sight. For the year-end version of this discipline, see our year-end 12-task cyber-hygiene sprint; June's review and December's sprint are the two bookends of a healthy SMB tech year.

• You've listed every recurring software charge and given each an owner
• You've flagged duplicate tools, idle seats, and monthly-vs-annual savings
• MFA is on for every admin account and you've removed everyone who left
• You've restored a backup, not just confirmed one exists
• You've picked the top two manual processes to automate this quarter
• Your invoicing reflects this year's GST changes and you have a data inventory
• You've repriced rate-linked lines and rechecked USD pricing after the cut
• You've assigned an owner and a date to your top three fixes

## FAQ ### How long does a half-year tech review actually take? For a 20–60 person SMB, about a day for someone who knows the stack. The SaaS audit is two to three hours, the security sweep one to two, and the automation and budget passes a couple more. The point is depth on the few things that matter, not a week-long inventory of everything. ### What's the single highest-return check on this list? The SaaS spend audit, almost always. The median SMB we review finds around ₹18,000 a month of cuttable spend, and the fix is just cancelling subscriptions — no build, no migration, immediate return. The security backup test is the highest-risk-reduction check, but the SaaS audit is the fastest money. ### Does the RBI rate cut really affect a small business's tech budget? Indirectly but really. A 50bps cut to 5.50% lowers the cost of rate-linked working-capital lines, which frees a little cash, and it trims FD yields, which nudges you to use idle cash better. For exporters, the knock-on rupee movement can change software-pricing margins. It's a prompt to recheck, not a crisis. ### Should I automate before or after the security sweep? Security first. Turning on MFA and testing a backup are same-day, zero-build wins that reduce real risk. Automations are valuable but take a build cycle. Close the free security gaps this week, then start the automation work that pays back over the quarter. ### We're a 10-person company — is this overkill? No, it's shorter. A 10-person firm might run the whole review in half a day. The categories are the same — wasted SaaS, missing MFA, an untested backup, a manual task worth automating — they're just fewer in number. Smaller teams often have proportionally more waste because nobody owns the tooling. ### Can you run this review for us instead? Yes. We run a fixed half-year tech review for Indian SMBs — the same six checks, with a written findings list and a prioritised fix plan you can hand to your team. It's one focused engagement, not an open-ended retainer.