Unused software licenses: how to find them on every platform and stop paying before renewal

The three places where unused licenses hide

When the software invoice arrives, one number gets looked at: how many licenses you pay for. But unused software licenses do not show up on the invoice. You have to go looking, and they sit in three different places:

• Purchased and never assigned. You signed up for 70 licenses “just in case” and assigned 62. The other 8 have no name on them and are billed all the same. This is the easiest group to see: every platform shows it under billing.
• Assigned to suspended accounts. The person left, someone suspended the account, and there it stayed. The license is still assigned and billed as if they were working. This is the most expensive group because it looks in use, and in a company that has gone three years without a review it can be 10 percent of the bill.
• Assigned to active people who never sign in. The sales rep with a licensed Zoom seat who runs every meeting on Meet. The designer who stopped opening Figma in March. They work at the company, but that particular license has gone unused for months.

A vendor would call the three groups together a “license optimization opportunity”. For you it is simpler: money that leaves every month and that nobody decided to spend.

How to see them in Google Workspace, Slack and Zoom

Google Workspace. In the admin console, under Billing, Subscriptions: for each plan you see how many licenses you bought and how many are assigned. For the second group, go to Users and filter by status “Suspended”: every name there that still has a license assigned is a license paid for nobody. For the third group, in the same user list add the last sign-in column and sort by date: anyone who has not signed in for 90 days is a candidate for a cheaper plan or for archiving.

Slack. Under Administration, Manage members, you see active and deactivated members. Slack only bills for active ones, so the second group here is solved by deactivating. Under Billing you see how many members are being charged in the current cycle; if that number is higher than the people who work at the company, someone is still active who should not be.

Zoom. Under User Management you see which accounts are licensed and which are basic (free). Under Reports, Usage, you see how many meetings each person hosted in the period. A licensed account with zero meetings in two months is the most common unused license in Zoom, and besides removing it you have to lower the quantity on your contract, or you keep paying.

What you have to do on each platform to stop paying

This is the confusing part: blocking a person does not mean the same thing everywhere. The table sums up what is verified in each vendor’s documentation. The full rules, with sources, are in License control.

Look at the last column. On half the platforms, removing the license from the person does not change the bill: there is a second step, lowering the quantity on the contract, done in the billing screen, that nobody does because nobody knows it exists.

The calendar: flexible plan, annual plan and the 30 days before

On a flexible (month-to-month) plan the rule is simple: what you release this month stops being billed next month. The cost of forgetting is one month of one license.

On an annual plan the cost of forgetting is a year. You committed to a quantity; you can raise it whenever you want, but lower it only on the renewal date. If that date passes with nobody reducing, the 8 unassigned licenses and the 5 on suspended accounts get paid for another 12 months. That is why the review does not happen when the invoice arrives, but 30 days before renewal: enough time to count, decide and change the quantity in the console.

A 20-minute monthly routine. On the first business day of each month, one person in operations or finance does this:

1. Opens Google Workspace billing and writes down purchased and assigned (3 minutes).
2. Reviews the suspended user list and flags the ones that still hold a license (5 minutes).
3. Checks in Slack and Zoom how many are being charged and compares with the headcount (5 minutes).
4. Reviews which annual plans renew in the next 45 days and what quantity is right (4 minutes).
5. Sends each manager the list of their unused licenses with one question: cut or keep? (3 minutes).

Twenty minutes a month does not sound like much, and it is not. The problem is that, with nobody assigned, it never happens.

What Mekovault does

The Licenses screen reads Google Workspace and shows, per platform, licenses purchased, used and sitting on suspended accounts, with what they cost per month. For each plan it tells you the last date you can reduce and the exact steps on that platform, with the verified rule: delete or archive in Google, deactivate in Slack, remove the license and lower the quantity in Zoom.

When an offboarding runs, that person’s license is flagged for release. And before every renewal you get a warning with the quantity you can drop to and where to do it. What Mekovault does not do is lower the quantity on the contract: the company does that step in each platform’s billing screen, because it is a change to the contract and the person who pays should be the one to sign off. For platforms that cannot be automated, Mekovault assigns an owner, records the seat and keeps the evidence that it was done.

If you want a number before you start, the calculator estimates what you pay each month for licenses nobody uses from your company’s three numbers. And if you do not yet know which tools the company pays for, start with the software inventory.