One report, once a month
I've talked to dozens of IT managers over the past year. The ones who keep their SaaS spending under control all have one thing in common. They run a single report, once a month, and actually act on it.
Not a quarterly audit. Not an annual review timed to budget season. A monthly habit that takes about an hour and saves thousands.
Here's what goes into that report and how to make it work for your team.
What the report should cover
The goal is simple. You want to answer one question: are we paying for software that nobody is using? That's it. Everything in the report serves that single question.
Start with a full list of every SaaS subscription your company pays for. Pull this from your finance tool, your procurement system, or even just your credit card statements. The source doesn't matter as long as it's complete. Most teams are surprised by how many subscriptions they find. I've seen companies with 40 employees paying for 90 different tools. That ratio is more common than you'd think.
Next, pull login data for each tool. When did someone last sign in? How often are they using it? Some platforms give you this information directly through admin dashboards. Others make it harder to find. For tools like Zendesk, you can look at agent activity logs. For others, you might need to check SSO logs or ask department leads.
The third piece is cost per seat. Not just the total subscription cost, but what you're paying per person. A tool that costs $50 per month for 10 seats looks different when you realize only 3 people actually log in.
Patterns that should worry you
Once you have teh data together, certain patterns jump out fast.
The most obvious one is the "ghost seat." Someone left the company six months ago and their license is still active. This happens constantly. Offboarding checklists miss things, especially when a company uses a lot of tools. Every ghost seat is pure waste.
Then there's the "logged in once" pattern. Someone got a license during onboarding, opened the tool on day one, and never came back. Maybe they didn't need it. Maybe they found a workaround. Either way, you're paying for a seat that delivers zero value.
Low-frequency usage is trickier. If someone logs into a tool twice a month, is that worth the license cost? It depends on what they're doing. A finance manager who runs payroll reports twice a month genuinely needs access. A marketing coordinator who opens the tool twice because they forgot their password probably doesn't.
Watch for seasonal patterns too. Some tools see heavy use in Q4 and almost none the rest of the year. That's fine if you can flex your seat count. It's wasteful if you're locked into annual contracts at peak capacity.
The overlap problem
One pattern that monthly reports catch better than annual reviews is tool overlap. This is when two or more tools do essentially the same thing for different teams.
Sales bought one project managment tool. Marketing bought another. Engineering uses a third. Everyone has their reasons, but you're paying three times for roughly the same capability. Monthly reports make this visible because you can see the usage patterns side by side.
I'm not saying you should force everyone onto one tool immediately. But you should at least know where the overlaps are and what they cost. Sometimes the answer is consolidation. Sometimes it's acknowledging that different teams have different needs. The point is to make that a conscious decision rather than an accident.
Acting on what you find
This is where most IT managers fall down. They run the report, find the waste, and then nothing happens. The report sits in a folder until next month when they run it again and find the same problems.
Set a rule for yourself. Every monthly report should result in at least two actions. Not findings. Actions. Something you actually do.
The easiest action is removing ghost seats. No negotiation needed, no politics, just deactivate the license. If someone complains, you can always re-enable it. In my experience, nobody ever complains. They didn't know they had the license in the first place.
For low-usage seats, send a quick message to the person before removing access. "Hey, I noticed you haven't used Tool X in three months. Do you still need it?" Nine times out of ten, the answer is no. People appreciate being asked rather than having access yanked without warning.
For bigger changes like tool consolidation, the monthly report builds your case over time. One month of data is an anecdote. Six months of data showing that marketing's project tool has 30% adoption while engineering's has 85% is a real argument for change.
Keep it simple
I've seen IT managers try to build elaborate dashboards wiht real-time data feeds and automated alerts. That's great if you have the resources. But most teams don't need that level of sophistication, at least not at first.
A spreadsheet works fine. Seriously. Columns for tool name, monthly cost, number of seats, active users, and last login date. Sort by waste (seats minus active users, multiplied by per-seat cost) and you have a prioritized action list.
The format doesn't matter. The habit does. Run it monthly. Act on what you find. Share the results with leadership so they see the value. That's the whole system.
What this looks like at scale
For companies with more than a few hundred employees, doing this manually gets painful. That's where tools like LicenseTrim come in. We built it specifically becuase we saw IT managers spending days each month on what should be a one-hour task. Automating the data collection piece means you can focus on decisions instead of spreadsheets.
But whether you automate or not, the principle stays the same. One report. Monthly. With real actions attached. It's the single most effective practice I've seen for keeping SaaS costs from quietly spiraling out of control.
Start this month. You'll find money you didn't know you were losing.