I recently reviewed our subscriptions and discovered we had been paying for several Zoom seats assigned to people who had left months earlier. No one had canceled them, so the charges just continued quietly. For organizations managing multiple SaaS products, what does your actual offboarding process look like? Do you use a documented checklist, HR-driven automation, SSO or SCIM provisioning, periodic license audits, or some combination? I'm trying to figure out whether this is just poor organization on our part or a common problem.
4 Answers
Automation handles the routine work, but regular reconciliation catches what automation misses. Compare active employees, assigned seats, usage reports, invoices, and your subscription inventory monthly or quarterly. The biggest leaks are often shadow-IT tools purchased on company cards rather than software managed by IT.
The basic fix is a documented offboarding ticket that lists every application, license, device, and account tied to the employee. HR should trigger it, and the ticket shouldn’t close until the tasks are completed. Anything that can’t be automated still needs an explicit manual task.
That’s probably where we went wrong. We had bits and pieces of a process, but never created one complete checklist and made someone responsible for closing it out.
License retention depends on the service. For email or systems containing business data, preserve or export the data first, then convert the account to an unlicensed archive or shared mailbox when the product supports it. For seats like video conferencing, design, or project tools, remove the license immediately unless there’s a specific retention requirement. Some companies keep annual subscriptions until renewal and true down the count then, but they should still track the unused seats so the waste doesn’t continue unnoticed.
For anything possible, assign licenses through identity-provider or directory groups. When HR marks someone as a leaver, disabling the account removes group membership and automatically releases many licenses. SSO and SCIM help a lot, but applications without those integrations should be documented as exceptions in the offboarding workflow.
Exactly. A checklist usually catches the tools IT knows about, but unapproved or independently purchased subscriptions can keep billing long after the owner leaves.