Every organisation over a few hundred people is paying for SaaS seats nobody uses. This is not a sign of poor management — it is the predictable outcome of an asymmetry built into how the tools are bought.
Adding a seat takes thirty seconds, costs a rounding error, and solves someone's immediate problem. Removing one requires knowing it is dormant, being confident that is not temporary, finding whoever owns the tool, and saving nothing at all until the contract next comes up. One side of that trade is frictionless and the other is entirely friction. Seats therefore accumulate, and the accumulation is invisible because it never appears as a decision — only as a slightly larger invoice each year.
Where the waste actually sits
Before hunting, it helps to know the four shapes this takes, because they need different evidence and different fixes.
- Leavers still provisioned
- The single largest and most easily proven category. Offboarding usually revokes SSO access promptly; it much less reliably reduces the contracted seat count, so the person is gone and the licence is still billed.
- Over-tiered users
- Everyone provisioned on the full-featured tier because it was simpler than deciding. A large share only ever read, comment or view — functions a viewer or light tier covers at a fraction of the price.
- Genuinely dormant
- Active employees, provisioned, who have not logged in for months. Often the residue of a project that ended or a workflow that moved to a different tool.
- Overlapping tools
- Two or three products doing substantially the same job, each bought by a different team with a legitimate need at the time. The most expensive category and the hardest politically, because consolidating means somebody loses their preferred tool.
Getting evidence people will accept
The technical part of this exercise is easy. The hard part is that removing a colleague's access requires evidence robust enough to survive the conversation, and "the report said you don't use it" is not.
Three sources, cross-referenced, are usually enough:
- The vendor's own admin console: provisioned users, assigned tier and last-active date. This is the ground truth for what you are paying for.
- Your identity provider: who is still an employee, in which department, and when they last authenticated to that application.
- The AP ledger: what you were actually invoiced, which is not always what the contract says or what the console shows.
Set the dormancy threshold deliberately and state it. Ninety days is defensible for most tools; some — a compliance system used at quarter end, a design tool used per project — need a longer window and an exemption you decide in advance rather than argue about afterwards.
The reclaim process
What makes this stick is that it is a standing cycle rather than an annual purge. A purge recovers a number once and rebuilds the same problem over the following eighteen months.
| Step | What it involves | Timing |
|---|---|---|
| Reconcile | Invoiced seats against provisioned seats against contracted seats, per tool. | Monthly |
| Sweep leavers | Cross-reference the provisioned list against active employees. No conversation required. | Monthly |
| Flag dormancy | Users past the threshold, listed with their manager and last-active date. | Quarterly |
| Notify | Email the user and manager: seat will be reclaimed in 14 days unless they say otherwise. Keep the replies. | Quarterly |
| Deprovision | Remove the seat and — the step that matters — record it against the next renewal so the count comes down. | Quarterly |
| Right-size at renewal | Reduce contracted quantity to the reconciled, post-reclaim number. | Per renewal |
The notify step is what makes the exercise survivable politically. A fortnight's warning with an easy way to object converts the whole thing from IT taking something away into a housekeeping routine, and the objections themselves are useful — they tell you which tools have quiet but real value.
The step almost everyone misses
Deprovisioning a user does not reduce the bill. On most agreements you are billed on contracted seats, not on seats in use, so a reclaimed licence sits in the pool costing exactly what it did before.
The saving is only realised at renewal, by reducing the contracted quantity — which means the reclaim work has to connect to the renewal calendar. Reclaim without that connection produces a tidy admin console and an unchanged invoice, and it is the reason so many of these exercises are quietly judged to have not worked.
Shadow IT: find it, do not fight it
Tools bought on a company card, below whatever threshold triggers procurement involvement, are the fastest-growing part of most SaaS estates. The instinct is to ban them. That is usually the wrong move: they exist because somebody had a real need that the sanctioned stack did not meet, and banning the tool does not remove the need.
The better approach is discovery, then triage. Card statements and expense claims will surface most of it. For each: is this duplicating something we already pay for, is it handling company data without a review, or is it a genuine gap the official stack should close? The first two need action. The third is intelligence about what your stack is missing.
Making it somebody's job
None of the above is difficult. All of it is recurring, low-status and easy to defer — a monthly reconciliation, a quarterly sweep, a set of emails, a spreadsheet kept current. It competes for attention against incidents and delivery, and it loses every time, which is why the seat count only ever goes one direction.
It is also work that needs no context on your architecture and no authority over your users. Someone external can run the reconciliation, produce the dormancy list, send the notifications and keep the register current, leaving your team the two things only they can do: deciding which tools stay, and having the conversation with the person who objects.
Common questions
How do you identify unused SaaS licences?
Cross-reference three sources: the vendor admin console for provisioned users, assigned tier and last-active date; your identity provider for who is still an employee and when they last authenticated; and the AP ledger for what you were actually invoiced. The gaps between contracted, provisioned and invoiced seats are usually the first and easiest recovery, and need no conversation with any user.
What is a reasonable dormancy threshold?
Ninety days without a login is defensible for most tools. Set exemptions in advance for anything used on a cycle rather than daily — a compliance system used at quarter end, a design tool used per project — so the exception is a decision rather than an argument after the seat has been removed.
Why did reclaiming seats not reduce our bill?
Because most agreements bill on contracted seats rather than seats in use. Deprovisioning frees the licence into your pool but changes nothing you pay. The saving is realised only at renewal by reducing the contracted quantity, which means the reclaim exercise has to be connected to the renewal calendar — and completed before the notice deadline.
How should shadow IT be handled?
Discover it before deciding anything. Card statements and expense claims surface most of it. Then triage each tool: duplicating something already paid for, handling company data without a review, or filling a genuine gap in the sanctioned stack. The first two need action; the third is useful information about what your official stack is missing. Banning the tool rarely removes the underlying need.
Is licence optimisation a one-off project or ongoing?
Ongoing. A one-off purge recovers a number once and rebuilds the same position within about eighteen months, because adding seats is frictionless and removing them is not. A monthly reconciliation and quarterly dormancy sweep keeps the estate flat instead of requiring another project.
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