Technology Waste Audit · System 01 · the one signal nobody can argue with
Match What You Pay For Against Who Still Works Here
A login shows that someone signed in. It doesn’t show the license was worth what you paid, or that nobody got in some other way. In most businesses, no single system knows what’s really being used: login records show who got in, but not whether it helped; the accounts show a charge, but not who used the product. One check cuts through almost all of that: whether the person the license belongs to still works here.
The idea in one line: check login records, each tool’s own user list, and your staff list against each other before calling anything unused. A license belonging to someone who left three months ago needs no such checking. It’s the one finding in this audit that’s hard to argue with.
No single source tells you everything
Four kinds of evidence, each with a blind spot the others happen to cover.
What each one tells you
- Login records (Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, Okta): who signed in to what, and when
- Each tool’s own user list: licenses bought, licenses given out, and often the tool’s own idea of who is “active”
- Your accounts and expense records: what you’re actually paying for, including tools nobody told the office manager about
- Your staff list: who works here now, by name
What each one can’t tell you on its own
- A login shows someone got in. Whether the tool helped them is a separate question
- “Active” means something different in every tool: signed in once, opened a page, or used a paid feature
- A company name on a card statement can be hard to recognize, and one charge can cover several products
- None of the first three knows, on its own, whether the person still works here
The staff list is what turns the other three from a hint into proof. Everything else in this audit needs judgment. Checking a license against someone who’s no longer on the staff list doesn’t.
What each source gives you, and its limits
The one finding that’s hard to argue with
Some findings in this audit need more proof than others.
A paid license that nobody has really used lately is something you can measure directly, which isn’t true of overlapping tools, missing connections between systems, or software bought without anyone knowing. And one version is almost impossible to argue with: a license still assigned to, and paid for, someone the staff list says no longer works here. There’s no judgment about what counts as “active enough.” The person is gone. The license isn’t.
Everything else, like a current employee who hasn’t signed in for 60 days, or a license that’s technically active but barely used, is real evidence, but it needs context: is this person on leave, did their job change, is the tool only used at certain times of year? Start with the list nobody can argue with. It’s often big enough on its own to justify the audit.
Build the license list
Matching each tool’s user list against the staff list by hand is exactly the kind of matching an AI assistant does well, as long as it sticks to matching and doesn’t start deciding what to cancel.
Download a user list from each tool, and your current staff list. Upload them together and send these two messages, in order.
- “Here’s a user list from [tool] and our current staff list. Match each user to a name on the staff list. List separately: users who match a current employee, and users whose name isn’t on the staff list at all.”
- “For the users who matched, add whatever last sign-in or activity details are in the file. Don’t recommend canceling anything yet. Just organize what we have.”
A worked example
A 40-person marketing agency downloads the user lists from its five paid tools and checks each one against its staff list.
What the check found
- 11 licenses across the five tools belong to people who left in the last 14 months; three of them left before the current office lease started.
- The project management tool has 34 licenses for 29 current employees; the other 5 belong to freelancers whose work has finished.
- One design tool’s user list has no sign-in dates at all. That’s a gap to note, rather than a finding to guess at.
What can be done now
- 11 licenses for people who’ve left, costing $6,400 a year according to the tools’ bills. Three of the five tools can be canceled this week, the other two at renewal.
- The design tool’s missing activity data becomes a question for System 02.
None of this needed a debate about what counts as “active.” It needed one list of current staff and five user lists, checked once.
A clean license list tells you who’s paying for what. It doesn’t yet tell you whether two tools doing similar jobs are really a waste, or whether the retyping someone complains about is a training problem or two systems that should be connected. System 02 covers how to tell the difference.