SaaS Software Asset Management: Integrating Every App Into Your IT Source of Truth

The SaaS stack isn't just growing—it's fragmenting. Every new AI tool, department-specific app, or contractor workspace increases the complexity of managing software assets across your organization. 

That complexity adds pressure on IT teams who are already burdened with manual processes, limited visibility, and constant security and compliance concerns.

The implications are significant. Without a comprehensive SaaS software asset management (SAM) approach, organizations are operating in the dark. 

IT teams lack visibility into who has access to what, security teams face constant risks from orphaned accounts, and finance teams struggle to optimize license spend. These gaps aren't theoretical—they're costing you real time, real money, and real risk exposure.

Most organizations still rely on a mix of spreadsheets, disconnected scripts, and partial tooling that only touch the "connected" apps—those that offer APIs or SCIM. That leaves a massive blind spot. What about:

• Apps without APIs or SCIM?
• AI tools without identity integrations?
• Contractor or vendor accounts that don’t pass through your IDP?

In this post, we'll explore why true SaaS software asset management involves integrating every app and user, regardless of connectivity, into your IT source of truth. And we’ll show how Stitchflow is uniquely built to deliver just that.

The state of SaaS software asset management today

A fractured ecosystem

Modern IT environments are sprawling across tools, teams, and territories. Departments often adopt apps without IT’s involvement—think marketing teams launching analytics tools like Mixpanel or design teams adding Figma without IT oversight. 

Contractors and external vendors frequently get provisioned outside centralized workflows, often using unmanaged or personal email addresses. 

Post-acquisition sprawl introduces new domains and duplicative systems. Meanwhile, employees may use apps with alias emails or shadow IT accounts, increasing the risk of unmonitored access.

A typical example is finance teams onboarding platforms like Expensify or Bill.com outside IT’s visibility, or legal teams trialing contract tools like Ironclad without governance. These cases don’t appear in your IDP and create hidden risks.

SpotOn, a fast-growing fintech with over 2,000 employees, found that managing disconnected apps required nearly a full-time IT headcount for every 500 employees, just to stay ahead of manual cleanup and access issues.

Limitations of traditional tools

Identity providers like Okta and Microsoft Entra have deprovisioning capabilities, but only for SCIM-compliant apps where workflows are properly configured. Most SaaS management platforms (SMPs) are similarly limited: they can only manage apps that expose an API.

This leaves significant gaps:

• Early-stage AI tools and niche apps often lack SCIM or APIs (e.g., ChatGPT teams, Perplexity, Descript)
• SSO/SCIM upgrades are prohibitively expensive—often $10+/user/month
• Internal tools and legacy systems are off-grid entirely

The result is a surface-level management model that only works for apps that cooperate, leaving the long tail unmanaged.

In a recent internal analysis across customers, Stitchflow found that disconnected or CSV-only apps accounted for 32% of the total app volume, meaning nearly a third of apps were invisible to most traditional platforms. This blind spot is where risk hides and where Stitchflow goes to work.

The hidden costs of incomplete SaaS management

IT overhead

Without automation across your whole SaaS landscape, IT teams are stuck spending two full days per week chasing spreadsheets, running VLOOKUPs, and doing manual license reconciliations. At scale, this becomes a recurring drag on productivity.

“Before Stitchflow, we had to hire someone just to manage offboarding. Now, we save 2 days/week and have full confidence in our compliance.” 

— Stitchflow, Customer, IT Director, SpotOn

Security and compliance gaps

Disconnected tools create risk blind spots:

• 53% of breaches stem from orphaned or unmonitored accounts
• 47% of audits fail due to missing deprovisioning evidence
• Manual offboarding can’t keep up with changes across AI tools, vendors, and departmental apps

Strada Education Network's GRC team shared:

“Our quarterly user access reviews used to take a full month. With Stitchflow, it’s a day.”

Wasted spend

When you can’t see every license, waste multiplies:

• 20%+ of SaaS licenses are unused or underutilized
• SSO upgrades offer visibility—but only if you’re willing to pay the premium

A Stitchflow audit revealed that 20% of licenses were unused across customers, even without requiring SSO access or API connections, highlighting significant real savings.

What does “integrating every app” really require?

How Stitchflow integrates disconnected apps: step by step

To cover every app, not just the ones with APIs, Stitchflow orchestrates a layered approach:

1. Data ingestion: Stitchflow pulls data from Identity and Access Management (IDP) systems (e.g., Okta, Entra), Human Resources (HR) systems (e.g., Workday, BambooHR), and any available app exports (e.g., CSV, usage reports). This ensures foundational user-to-role mapping and Active Directory linkage.
2. Intelligent CSV automation: For apps that lack an API (e.g., specific financial tools, internal systems), Stitchflow automates the ingestion and transformation of CSV exports into structured insights. It recognizes user IDs, roles, last login timestamps, and entitlements to generate a consistent identity view.
3. Browser-based integrations: Using proprietary Chrome extensions, Stitchflow can extract access data directly from app UIs for tools that lack export functionality. For instance, access logs and user roles from project tools like Asana or Notion can be captured without code or manual tracking.
4. Coming soon: AI browser agent: This new capability will visually crawl and extract user data from apps without human input—ideal for AI tools or legacy portals where even CSV exports are unavailable.
5. Cross-system reconciliation via the IT graph: All inputs are resolved into a single, unified view of users and access. This graph-based model dynamically identifies:
   • Orphaned accounts (no matching HR or IDP record)
   • Shadow users (non-corporate emails or aliases)
   • Over-licensed roles (low activity or duplicate access)

This multi-modal approach ensures Stitchflow handles the "long tail" of disconnected apps—the ones traditional systems ignore—and creates continuous, audit-ready context without requiring brittle workflows.

The result? Unified visibility, continuous compliance, and a dramatic reduction in SaaS-related IT overhead.

Beyond SCIM: coverage that closes the visibility gap

Stitchflow was designed to work across every kind of app, not just the cooperative ones. That includes:

• CSV-only or UI-driven tools like Notion, Loom, or custom internal apps
• Contractor or third-party accounts provisioned outside the IDP
• Multi-domain or post-acquisition environments where user identities are fragmented

Stitchflow uses its IT graph to reconcile user data across IDPs, HR systems, and apps—filling in the gaps where APIs or SCIM aren’t available.

Real-time, continuous reconciliation

Traditional tooling gives you snapshots. Stitchflow provides a live, continuously updated map of your SaaS environment by:

• Ingesting HR data (e.g., Workday, BambooHR)
• Syncing with IDPs (Okta, Entra, etc.)
• Integrating with apps via API, CSV, or browser automation
• Mapping usage and access patterns through Slack and Chrome extensions

No stale data. No spreadsheet debt. Just complete visibility.

Stitchflow: the platform that finishes the job

IT graph: unified context for every identity

At the core of Stitchflow is its IT graph, a dynamic data engine that:

• Links user records across domains and tools, even with inconsistent naming or a lack of SCIM
• Highlights orphaned, duplicate, or risky accounts
• Ties every app back to business roles and org structure

It doesn’t just map your users—it understands them in context.

100% app coverage

Whether it’s a cutting-edge AI tool or an ancient on-prem system, Stitchflow adapts:

• CSV automation for non-integrated tools
• Chrome extensions to track usage where APIs are unavailable
• AI browser agents (coming soon) for visual data extraction

With Stitchflow, no app is too disconnected.

License optimization without guesswork

Instead of guessing at usage:

• Automatically detect unused or dormant accounts
• Trigger Slack-based license surveys to validate the app's needs
• Reclaim licenses with one-click deprovisioning or automated ITSM tickets

Strada, for example, achieved a 15% reduction in annual SaaS spend through Stitchflow’s license reclamation workflows.

Compliance and security, you can prove

• Continuous auditing across 100% of apps
• Built-in alerts for risky, hidden, or unowned accounts
• Pre-built audit evidence exports to simplify your next review
• Seamless remediation workflows that reduce your team’s burden

Real-world results: from chaos to control

Stitchflow customers aren’t just saving money—they’re transforming how IT works across the business.

SpotOn (2,000+ employees)

Before Stitchflow, SpotOn’s IT team relied heavily on spreadsheets, VLOOKUPs, and Slack pings to identify and clean up old or unused accounts. The offboarding process alone required a dedicated resource to manually check and reconcile user access across a patchwork of tools, most of which lacked SCIM or even basic API access.

With Stitchflow, SpotOn:

• Closed 314 security gaps in one month by automatically identifying orphaned and risky accounts across disconnected apps
• Saved $160K in annual SaaS spend by reclaiming unused licenses across shadow tools and legacy systems
• Remediated offboarding gaps across 100+ apps in under 30 minutes using Stitchflow’s automated ITSM ticket creation and 1-click remediation workflows

"Before Stitchflow, we had to hire someone just to manage offboarding. Now, we save 2 days/week and have full confidence in our compliance." 

— Stitchflow Customer, IT Director, SpotOn.

[Read the full story]

Strada Education Network

Strada’s compliance team faced ongoing challenges with quarterly access reviews. Each cycle involved extracting user access data from multiple systems, aligning it with HR records, and confirming access with business owners. This process previously took up to a full month to complete.

By integrating Stitchflow:

• Quarterly reviews now take just one day, thanks to the platform’s real-time user-to-role mapping and Slack-based app ownership surveys
• A 15% reduction in annual SaaS spend was achieved by surfacing inactive users and routing license deprovisioning into automated workflows.

"Our quarterly user access reviews used to take a full month. With Stitchflow, it’s a day." 

— Stitchflow Customer, GRC Lead, Strada.

These transformations demonstrate the power of full visibility and automation, not only for risk reduction but also for enhancing IT productivity and achieving strategic alignment.

Why Stitchflow over IDPs, SMPs, or spreadsheets?

Where IDPs fall short

Identity providers like Okta and Microsoft Entra are excellent for federating access and handling single sign-on (SSO), but their automation capabilities are limited to SCIM-enabled applications. If an app doesn’t support SCIM or the integration isn’t configured, the IDP can’t detect or deprovision users. For example:

• A contractor onboarded via email for a marketing analytics tool like Mixpanel may never enter Okta’s radar.
• Post-acquisition tools running under legacy domains often have zero SCIM coverage, leaving orphaned accounts unnoticed.

Where SMPs stall out

SaaS management platforms, such as Torii, Zylo, and BetterCloud, primarily rely on API integrations. This works fine for well-integrated apps like Salesforce or Zoom, but breaks down with:

• CSV-only tools (e.g., expense software like Abacus)
• Early-stage AI apps (e.g., ChatGPT Teams, Runway, or Jasper)
• UI-based access tools like Notion or ClickUp, which don’t expose meaningful APIs for user audit

In practice, many organizations find that 25–35% of their total app volume isn’t API-accessible, meaning SMPs can’t deliver license optimization or compliance evidence across that footprint.

Where Stitchflow completes the picture

Only Stitchflow:

• Detects apps across your stack, regardless of SCIM or API
• Extracts access data via intelligent CSV ingestion, browser automation, or AI agents
• Ties all identities into a unified graph for full visibility
• Automates license reclamation, audit reporting, and orphaned account remediation—even for messy, non-integrated tools

"We were juggling spreadsheets, running messy VLOOKUPs just to find old accounts. Stitchflow turned that into a one-click audit." 

— Stitchflow Customer, IT Manager, SpotOn

For IT teams that operate in the real world—not just clean, SCIM-compliant systems—Stitchflow finishes the job others can’t.?

• IDPs stop at SCIM-compliant apps. Stitchflow doesn’t.
• SMPs are API-bound. Stitchflow includes apps without APIs.
• Spreadsheets are static. Stitchflow is live, contextual, and complete.

Unlike alternatives that handle only clean and connected apps, Stitchflow tackles the real-world environment in which IT teams work.

The bottom line

You can’t manage what you can’t see. And in today’s AI-fueled, multi-domain, contractor-heavy environment, partial visibility is a liability.

Stitchflow offers:

• Complete coverage across all users and all apps
• Automation that eliminates busywork and reduces security risk
• License savings without the need for SCIM or SSO upgrades
• Audit-proof compliance across even your messiest systems

Ready to unify your SaaS ecosystem and take back control?

Book a demo today.