Software Asset Management
The hidden cost of unused software licences
Unassigned seats are the most common and most recoverable form of IT waste. Here is how to find them and stop them coming back.
· 6 min read
Every organisation we review has licences nobody is using. The cause is rarely negligence — it is that nothing in the normal course of business creates a moment to check.
Where the waste accumulates
Leavers. Someone leaves, their account is disabled, and their licence stays assigned. Disabling an account does not release a subscription seat; that is a separate action, and it is nobody's specific job.
Edition drift. A user is placed on a higher plan for a project, the project ends, and the plan stays. Over a few years a meaningful proportion of an organisation's seats end up a tier above what the role needs.
Departmental duplication. Two teams independently buy tools that do the same thing. Neither is aware of the other, because the purchases went through different budget lines.
Renewal by default. A subscription renews at last year's count because nobody reviewed it. This is the largest single source, and the easiest to fix.
Finding it
The reconciliation is straightforward in principle: list what you own, list what is assigned, list what is actually used, and compare. In practice the difficulty is that the three lists live in different places — purchase records in finance, assignments in each vendor's admin console, usage in whatever telemetry the product exposes.
Usage is the one most often skipped, and it is the one that finds edition drift. An assigned seat that has not been signed into for ninety days is a candidate for reclamation regardless of what the assignment list says.
Stopping it recurring
A one-off cleanup recovers cost once. Keeping it recovered needs two things:
- Licence release in the leaver process. Not as a documented step, but as an actual action with an owner, in the same checklist as disabling the account.
- A renewal calendar with a review window. Every renewal date recorded, with a reminder far enough ahead that a reduction can still be made. Renewals that arrive as a surprise get paid.
Neither is technically difficult. Both fail for the same reason: they are small tasks that are never anyone's priority, which is precisely why they are worth assigning explicitly.