© 2026 Procr
Your finance team approved several million dollars in SaaS contracts last year. What they may not know about are the seats that have not been logged into since Q1, the duplicate tools running in parallel across three departments, and the five-seat minimums your company is paying for tools only two people actually use. A SaaS licence audit identifies all of it. This guide walks through how to run one, from first inventory pull to contract action, without specialised software or a dedicated procurement function.
According to Zylo's 2025 SaaS Management Index, which covers $40 billion of SaaS spend across 40 million licences, 52.7% of purchased licences sit idle. The average organisation wastes $19.8 million annually on unused or underutilised software. For mid-market organisations, the number is smaller but proportionally similar: Vertice estimates that companies of around 600 employees waste roughly $1 million per year in unused SaaS licences.
The root cause is structural. SaaS purchasing is decentralised by design. A sales rep upgrades their Gong tier. Engineering adds 10 Datadog seats. HR purchases a new onboarding tool without notifying IT. Finance sees the invoices, approves them against a cost centre, and moves on. No one has full visibility across the stack.
That gap compounds at renewal time. Vendors auto-renew at full price, and some contracts include escalation clauses that increase the price automatically unless you take action. Teams that skip periodic licence audits hand vendors full information advantage at the negotiating table.
Before pulling a single invoice, gather three inputs.
Finance export: A 12-month transaction report filtered to software, cloud, and SaaS categories. Every line item, including charges buried in corporate card statements and department budgets.
Identity provider data: A user list from your SSO or identity provider, whether that is Okta, Azure AD, or Google Workspace. This shows who theoretically has access to each application.
Contract file: PDFs or links for every vendor agreement. If these do not exist in a central location, that problem will become obvious during the audit, and fixing it is part of the deliverable.
Specialised SaaS management software is not required to start. A well-structured spreadsheet works. The discipline of the process matters more than the tooling.
The goal of this step is a single list of every SaaS application your organisation is paying for, with enough context to evaluate each one.
For each application, record:
Pull from all three sources simultaneously: the finance export, the identity provider, and any existing IT asset register. Each source will surface tools the others missed. Corporate card statements regularly catch subscriptions that never went through formal procurement.
Do not exclude free-tier or trial tools. If a team is running a production workflow on a free-tier account, they will eventually hit a paywall, and that becomes a purchase that bypasses procurement review.
A first-pass inventory at a 200-person company typically surfaces 80 to 150 distinct SaaS tools. Most finance teams are surprised at the number.
Licence entitlement and actual usage are almost never the same number.
For each application in your inventory:
Cross-reference your active user list against your HR system. Departed employees frequently retain active licences for months after leaving. In a Productiv analysis of nearly 100 million SaaS licences, 40% were found to be unused, with a significant share attributable to accounts left open after employee offboarding.
Focus first on your highest-cost applications. If Salesforce shows 20% of its licences sitting unassigned, that is a quantifiable savings opportunity before the next renewal. If Zoom has 50 licences but only 30 active users, you have specific leverage to right-size at contract time.
Record the gap for each vendor: purchased seats minus active seats equals the reclaim pool.
Seat count alone does not tell the full story. A licence can show as active while still being substantially underused. A Salesforce user who logs in once a month to pull a single report does not need an Enterprise licence.
Utilisation measurement requires admin console access, which not every finance team has directly. If you do not have it, request it from the vendor or from whoever manages the IT relationship. Most major SaaS vendors provide usage dashboards in their admin portals at no additional cost.
For each application, assess three things:
Feature utilisation: Are users accessing the core features of the plan, or a narrow subset of them?
Tier appropriateness: Is the team on an Enterprise plan when a Professional plan covers all active use cases?
Overlap: Are multiple tools doing the same job? A team running both Slack and Microsoft Teams for internal communication is paying for both and using neither fully.
Document every overlap. Tool consolidation is frequently the highest-value finding of a licence audit, and it requires cross-department alignment, not just a vendor conversation.
By the end of Step 3, you have enough data to sort every application into one of four categories.
Keep as-is: Active usage matches the licence count and the tier fits actual needs. No action required before the next renewal.
Right-size: Users are active but the seat count or tier exceeds actual use. Target this before the renewal window opens. Most vendors will reduce seats at renewal; fewer will reduce mid-contract without a concession in return.
Consolidate: Two or more tools serve the same function. Identify which one has higher adoption and initiate a migration plan. Consolidation typically needs 60 to 90 days of lead time before the relevant renewal dates.
Cancel: No active users and no business purpose. Serve notice within the contractual notice window. Pull the contract to confirm the required period before acting.
Prioritise cancel and right-size first. These have defined financial outcomes and clear deadlines. Consolidation carries higher long-term value but requires internal coordination and longer lead times.
An audit produces no savings if the findings do not reach vendors before renewal deadlines.
For every application in the right-size, consolidate, or cancel categories:
If a tool renews in 45 days and requires 30 days notice, you have 15 days to act. That is workable if you move immediately. If the tool renews in two weeks, the window for this cycle may already be closed. Document it, add it to the renewal calendar, and act earlier next year.
For right-sizing conversations, come to vendors with specific numbers. A finance lead who says they are paying for 50 seats and 32 are active, and need to right-size to 35 at renewal, is in a materially stronger position than one making a vague request for a better price. Vendors respond to data.
A full first-time audit takes two to four weeks for a 100- to 300-person company, assuming reasonable access to finance data and vendor admin consoles. Gartner research indicates that organisations running quarterly reviews reduce unused subscription costs by roughly 25% compared to those running a single annual sweep.
In practice, most mid-market teams operate on a tiered schedule:
Monthly: Review invoices for new subscriptions. Flag anything without a contract owner.
Quarterly: Check utilisation on the five to ten highest-cost applications. Update the renewal calendar with any upcoming deadlines.
Annually: Full inventory refresh, complete user access review, and contract archive update.
The quarterly check takes one to two hours once your inventory baseline is established. The annual full audit takes four to six weeks the first time and becomes substantially faster in subsequent years.
A first-time full audit for a 100- to 300-person company typically takes two to four weeks, depending on how accessible your finance data and vendor admin consoles are. Manual processes land at the high end of that range; automated discovery tools compress it significantly. Subsequent annual audits run faster once the baseline inventory is in place.
Zylo's 2025 SaaS Management Index found that 52.7% of purchased licences sit idle, with average annual waste of $19.8 million across the organisations it tracks. For mid-market organisations, Vertice data puts the figure at roughly $1 million per year for a company of around 600 employees. Organisations with mature SaaS management programmes that include quarterly reviews maintain idle seat rates below 10%.
Finance can complete most of the financial layer independently: pulling spend data, identifying vendors, and flagging spend without a contract owner. Utilisation data typically requires access to vendor admin consoles, which IT usually owns. The most effective audits split the work: finance owns the cost and contract layer, IT owns the access and utilisation layer, and both sets of findings are reconciled in a shared inventory.
Notice requirements vary by vendor and contract. The most common terms are 30, 60, or 90 days written notice before the renewal date. Missing the notice window triggers automatic renewal at the current price, or higher if the contract includes an escalation clause. Track the notice period for every application in your renewal calendar.
Cancelling terminates the contract entirely when the current term ends. Right-sizing means reducing the seat count or downgrading the plan at renewal to match actual usage, while keeping the product active. Right-sizing suits tools delivering real value but with licensed capacity exceeding team needs. Cancelling suits tools where utilisation has fallen to near zero or where another tool fully covers the function.
Procr
See what Procr does with your real vendor portfolio.