The last few years have witnessed impressive advances in a number of different subtraction and phase-space slicing schemes for next-to-next-to-leading order (NNLO) computations, allowing all 2 $\to$ 2 processes to be computed at this order. Nevertheless, these schemes are typically extremely complicated, and it is useful to consider potential simplifications. I will present a modification of the residue-improved sector decomposition subtraction method which removes a redundant sector, and allows the method to be formulated through iterative subtractions. The result is a transparent singular structure through which the cancellation of the poles can be performed explicitly, and a finite contribution which can be calculated in four dimensions. As a proof-of-principle calculation, I will show the NNLO contributions to the Drell-Yan process in the quark-antiquark channel.