How do I audit our SaaS licenses?
Start with a spend inventory from your accounting system, join it against per-tool user counts, and flag any tool where paid seats exceed active users by more than 20%.
Details
The audit process has four steps: discover every tool, count paid seats, count active users, and calculate the reclaimable delta. Steps 1–2 come from finance data; steps 3–4 require API access to each vendor.
The bottleneck is step 3 — most vendors gate usage APIs behind higher-tier plans, and building integrations one-by-one is expensive. A packaged tool that already has the integrations (Zylo, Productiv, SeatMap.AI) shortens a 6-week project to an afternoon.
A safe first audit reveals 15–30% reclaimable spend. Companies that never audit accumulate 40%+ waste within 3 years.
Steps
- 1Pull a report of every recurring vendor from your accounting system (Ramp, Brex, QuickBooks).
- 2For each vendor, look up the current billed seat count from your last invoice or admin console.
- 3For each vendor, pull an active-user count over the last 30 days.
- 4Reclaim = billed seats minus active users, minus a 10% safety buffer.
- 5Sort reclaim opportunities by annualized dollar impact and start with the top 5.
Automate this with SeatMap.AI
The audit path above works. It also takes hours per month per tool. SeatMap.AI runs it on a schedule, stages the reclaim actions for review, and shows you the annualized savings in real dollars.