The 20-Minute License Audit Most CT Small Businesses Never Do
Most small businesses we look at are paying for software nobody uses. Not because anyone was careless. Licenses get added when someone joins and almost never get removed when someone leaves.
Here's the check. It takes about 20 minutes, and you don't need an IT person to do it.
Step 1: Pull the list (5 minutes)
Open the last three months of credit card and bank statements. Write down every recurring software charge: Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace, QuickBooks, Adobe, Zoom, Dropbox, your CRM, your scheduling tool, anything billed monthly or yearly. Note the amount and how many users it covers.
Don't skip the small ones. A $12-a-month tool nobody remembers signing up for is $144 a year, and there are usually several.
Step 2: Count real users (10 minutes)
For each tool, log into the admin page and look at the user list. Then ask three questions:
- Is every name on this list still working here?
- Has every person signed in within the last 60 days? Most admin pages show the last sign-in date.
- Are two tools doing the same job? Zoom and Teams. Dropbox and OneDrive. Two different project boards.
Mark every seat that fails one of those questions.
Step 3: Do the math (5 minutes)
Multiply the unused seats by the monthly price, then by 12. Here's what that looks like for a typical 12-person office:
- 3 Microsoft 365 licenses still assigned to people who left, at $22 a month: $792 a year
- A second video-meeting tool kept "just in case," at $15 a month: $180 a year
- 2 unused seats on a design tool, at $23 a month: $552 a year
That's $1,524 a year from 20 minutes of checking, and nobody loses anything they actually use.
Before you cancel anything
Two cautions.
First, don't just delete a former employee's account. Their email and files may still matter: client threads, contracts, shared folders. In Microsoft 365, convert the mailbox to a shared mailbox (small shared mailboxes don't need a license), then remove the license. In Google Workspace, transfer ownership of their Drive files before deleting the user.
Second, check your renewal terms. Annual plans often can't be reduced mid-term. Put each renewal date on your calendar two weeks early so you can cut seats before you're billed for another year.
Make it stick
The audit isn't the fix. The fix is a rule: when someone leaves, their licenses come off the same week. Add it to your offboarding checklist next to "collect the laptop" and "change the shared passwords."
If you don't have an offboarding checklist, that's the real finding.
After the first time, repeat Step 2 once a quarter. It takes about 10 minutes.
Why this matters more than it looks
Unused seats are also a security problem. A login for someone who left is an account nobody is watching. If that password shows up in a data breach somewhere else, whoever finds it can get into your email or files, and nobody notices.
Removing the access and cutting the cost are the same step.
Want a second set of eyes? We do a free systems review for Connecticut small businesses, and a license check is part of it. Request one here.