The two types of SaaS waste
When companies look at SaaS spend there are two very different problems, and they require different fixes.
The first is unused seats— licenses assigned to users who don't log in. Former employees, contractors whose projects ended, people who switched to a different tool their team adopted. The subscription renews, the seat stays assigned, nobody notices.
The second is redundant tools — multiple subscriptions doing the same job. Two project management tools. Three video conferencing options. A design tool someone bought and a department-wide license that overlaps. This is harder to catch because both tools might have active users — just not necessarily the same users, and maybe not enough to justify both bills.
Start with unused seats. It's faster, less politically fraught, and easier to act on. Nobody fights for a license they haven't used in four months.
Step 1: Get a complete list of what you're paying for
SaaS subscriptions accumulate across company credit cards, department budgets, and individual expense reports. The IT-managed tools are easy to find. The ones Finance approved two years ago and nobody revisited are not.
Pull your last 12 months of credit card and expense statements and search for recurring software charges. Check with Finance for any annual software contracts. Ask department heads what tools their team is using. You'll almost certainly find subscriptions that IT didn't know about.
Step 2: Find the unused seats in each tool
For each subscription, you want to know: how many seats are you paying for, and how many of those users actually log in? The gap between those two numbers is your quickest win.
The process varies by tool:
- Microsoft 365: Admin center → Reports → Usage → Microsoft 365 active users. Or query Entra ID for sign-in timestamps via PowerShell if you have Entra ID P1/P2.
- Google Workspace: Admin console → Reports → Users. Includes last login per user.
- Slack: Settings & administration → Analytics → Members. Shows last active date per member.
- GitHub: Organization settings → People. For GitHub Teams, every org member counts as a paid seat regardless of activity — there’s no automatic removal for inactivity. GitHub Enterprise Cloud has “active committer” billing in some configurations, but verify your specific plan before assuming this applies to you.
- Zoom: Admin → User Management → Users. Inactive users can be identified and downgraded from licensed to basic.
- Jira/Confluence: Atlassian admin → Users. Shows last active date. You can change inactive users from licensed to "Unlicensed" product access.
The tedious part is doing this for every tool, one by one, and keeping the results organized. Most teams do it in a spreadsheet and revisit it once or twice a year.
Step 3: Remove or downgrade the inactive accounts
Before removing anyone, do a quick sanity check: Is the account a service account or shared mailbox? Is the person on leave? Are they a part-time or seasonal employee who logs in infrequently? A short check with their manager takes a minute and prevents accidents.
Once confirmed, remove or downgrade. For most tools, removing a user license doesn't delete their data — it just stops the billing for that seat. You can usually re-add them later if needed.
After you've reduced your actual user count, go back to your subscription and reduce your committed seat count. With Microsoft NCE and Google Workspace, this typically happens at renewal unless your agreement allows mid-term reductions. Slack and most other tools adjust billing automatically when you remove members.
Step 4: Tackle the redundant tools
Once you've cleaned up unused seats, look at the tool overlap. Pull usage data from each overlapping tool and compare: how many people use tool A, how many use tool B, how many use both? That tells you whether there's a genuine need for both or just inertia.
The conversation to consolidate tools is more political than the unused seat cleanup. People get attached to their tools. Frame it as standardization rather than cost-cutting — a single agreed tool with a proper rollout usually gets more buy-in than "we're canceling the thing you use."
The part that doesn't scale: doing this manually
Going through six or seven admin consoles, exporting CSVs, and cross-referencing them in a spreadsheet takes most of a day. Then you have to do it again in three months because new people joined and left in the meantime.
If you're only managing one or two tools, the manual process is probably fine. Once you're tracking five or more SaaS subscriptions with regular headcount movement, the overhead of staying on top of it manually adds up.
Automating the unused seat check
Reach Seatsconnects to your SaaS providers via OAuth and runs the unused seat check automatically every day. It covers Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, Slack, GitHub, Zoom, and Jira — shows you which seats are inactive, how long they've been inactive, and what each one costs per month.
It doesn't handle the redundant tools problem — that's a more manual, people-and-process challenge. But it does handle the seat waste problem continuously, so you don't need to run the audit manually every quarter. 7-day free trial, no credit card required.