SaaS Spend Management: Instant License Reclamation for Budget Optimization

You checked the dashboard. It looked fine. But you still renewed 80 unused licenses.

That’s the trap.

You had your license usage report. You even got a renewal reminder. But by the time you’d cross-checked spreadsheets, followed up on a few Jira tickets, and pinged managers on Slack, the clock had run out. The finance team paid the invoice because it was easier than delaying it another quarter.

The result? Dozens of licenses were renewed for users who no longer needed them, some of whom had left the company weeks prior.

That’s the painful reality most IT and procurement teams face: SaaS spend isn’t just about what you see—it’s about what you can’t act on fast enough.

This is why modern SaaS spend management software has to go beyond dashboards. It must turn visibility into action, and do it quickly enough to matter.

Why SaaS spend spirals out of control

SaaS adoption is at an all-time high. The average mid-sized company now runs over 200 SaaS applications. But with growth comes fragmentation:

• Tools purchased by individual teams without IT visibility
• Contractors onboarded without clear offboarding workflows
• Legacy apps are still active, but are rarely used

This decentralization leads to license bloat, missed offboarding, and renewal surprises. And when IT lacks central visibility and control, budgets take the hit.

“We had to manually deactivate users across multiple apps—Google Workspace, Slack, Asana, GitHub, Salesforce, and more. Every offboarding required several hours a week, and even then, we sometimes missed people, creating security risks.”
— Edwin Katabaro, CISO at Turing

The hidden cost of license bloat

Unused licenses don’t just waste money. They:

• Skew renewal decisions with inflated user counts
• Exposing companies to audit and compliance risks
• Create access gaps that Security can’t track
• Burn IT hours in manual checks, tickets, and spreadsheets

Most license bloat stems from three core problems:

1. Orphaned licenses: The user is no longer active, but the license remains active.
2. Duplicate users: One person, multiple accounts across domains.
3. Low usage apps: Paid for, rarely used, but still renewed.

Traditional dashboards can tell you what is being used. But they can’t help you fix what’s not.

Why visibility isn’t the problem, actionability is

Most SaaS spend platforms offer dashboards. Some give alerts before renewals. But the problem isn’t that IT lacks data. It’s that they can’t move quickly enough to do something with it.

Let’s say a license renewal hits in 7 days. You open your admin panel and see 300 users assigned to a tool. Only 180 show recent activity. But now what?

• Are the other 120 safe to remove?
• Are any of them contractors who’ve already left?
• Are there duplicate accounts tied to multiple aliases?
• Do you need to run it by Finance, Legal, or someone’s manager?

If the answer involves creating a Jira ticket, checking an HR system, or chasing someone for confirmation, those licenses are probably getting renewed.

And that’s how waste creeps in: slowly, quietly, expensively.

Stitchflow: SaaS spend management software that lets IT take control

Stitchflow is built to stop license waste before it happens. Instead of static dashboards, it gives IT teams real-time, identity-aware automation to:

• Detect stale, duplicate, or orphaned accounts
• Reclaim licenses with 1-click
• Ensure every license is assigned to an active, known identity

Here’s how:

1. Identity stitching across domains and aliases

Many users operate under multiple aliases or domains, particularly in environments that involve external collaborators, contractors, or acquisitions. Stitchflow intelligently connects fragmented identity data, matching based on activity, metadata, and system associations, to build a unified user profile. This eliminates blind spots where licenses are mistakenly assigned to duplicate accounts or overlooked entirely because the email doesn’t match HR records.

1. Usage-based license triggers

Not all inactivity is equal. Stitchflow enables IT to define nuanced rules, such as "no login for 30 days," "no file activity in 60 days," or "no team participation in 45 days." These policies are dynamically enforced. Rather than waiting for end-of-quarter audits, IT gets a rolling, real-time view of inactive licenses and the ability to clean them up as soon as the window closes.

1. System of record integration

Disconnected apps are often the weak link in the offboarding process. Stitchflow continuously cross-references user status from your HR system of record with app activity. Suppose someone’s marked as offboarded in Workday or Rippling, but their accounts remain active in tools like Salesforce, Notion, or Zoom. In that case, those accounts are flagged immediately, reducing the lag between HR events and actual license revocation.

1. One-click license reclamation

Instead of collecting data across tabs or opening ITSM tickets, Stitchflow surfaces every license in a unified dashboard. Each user tile includes context, such as HR status, login history, group memberships, and connected systems. From there, IT can reclaim the license in a single click, or assign follow-up to a stakeholder if business validation is needed. That’s the difference between real action and “awareness.”

“We reviewed 7,000 accounts across multiple applications in just 15 minutes with all the context needed for quick decisions. Renewals no longer keep us up at night.”
— Director of Enterprise Applications, global fintech company
[Read the full case study]

Spreadsheets and legacy tools won’t keep up—and here’s why

Still relying on spreadsheets and admin panels? Here's the problem:

Most tools only give you visibility. Stitchflow gives you control.

Objection: “Can’t we just do this manually?”

This is one of the most common objections IT teams face when introducing automation to SaaS license management. Manual cleanup seems feasible, especially for smaller teams or during renewal season. But let’s look at what that involves:

• It won’t scale: Manually reviewing license usage across hundreds of apps means combing through admin panels, spreadsheets, and Jira tickets. Each license validation might require Slack messages, emails, or approval chains. That works when you’re managing five apps. Not when you’re managing 200.
• It’s reactive: Manual cleanup typically occurs when finance raises a red flag, often too late in the cycle to make informed strategic decisions. By the time the audit is complete, the invoice will already have been paid.
• It’s error-prone: IT doesn’t always have complete context about users, especially across departments or domains. Without reliable validation from a system of record or usage data, it’s easy to remove licenses that are still in use or miss those that aren’t.
• It’s unsustainable: SaaS ecosystems are constantly evolving. Contractors come and go. Teams experiment with tools. New apps get added monthly. Keeping up with this manually is not only inefficient, but it also diverts IT’s time and attention from strategic work.

Stitchflow eliminates this friction. With automated identity stitching, real-time usage triggers, and system-of-record checks, license reclamation becomes a continuous, background process, rather than an overwhelming quarterly fire drill.

And that means IT can stay ahead of SaaS bloat without burning out.

IT + Finance: Working together to reduce spend

SaaS spend optimization isn’t just IT’s responsibility—it’s a joint effort with Finance:

• IT gets tools to automate cleanup.
• Finance gets clean license counts and lower renewal invoices.
• Both get fewer fire drills and better audit outcomes.

🔗 Want to build better workflows? Read: SaaS Renewal Management

Conclusion: Visibility without action is just a report

Seeing the problem isn’t the same as solving it. SaaS spend dashboards help you spot waste, but they don’t help you clean it up. That’s where most tools fall short.

Stitchflow makes license reclamation instant, continuous, and reliable—so IT can stop firefighting and start optimizing. With identity stitching, usage-based triggers, and real-time validation against your HR system, you’re always one step ahead of bloat.

Don’t just monitor SaaS spend. Act on it.

Want to see what Stitchflow can help you clean up before your next renewal? Book a demo now.