Seat Sprawl

Seat sprawl is the slow, unmanaged growth of paid user licences across a company's SaaS estate: seats added one at a time for new hires, contractors, agency partners and one-off projects, and then never removed. Individually each addition is trivial and easy to approve; collectively they become one of the largest sources of avoidable software spend, because seat-based pricing charges for provisioned access rather than for use. The mechanics are simple. Somebody requests a seat, an admin grants it in seconds, and nothing in the process schedules its removal. The employee leaves, the contract ends, the project finishes, and the account remains — logging in never, billing every month. Duplicate identities make it worse: the same person appears once under a work email and once under a personal one, or under two addresses after a domain change or a company rebrand. Sprawl is also directional; it only ever grows, because adding a seat is a self-service action and removing one requires somebody to notice. The structural fix is to make removal automatic rather than remembered. SCIM provisioning tied to your identity provider deactivates the application account when the directory account is disabled, which turns offboarding from a checklist item into a side effect of HR doing its job. Where SCIM is unavailable, the fallback is a quarterly access review: export the seat list, match it against the current employee directory, and reclaim anything unmatched or dormant beyond a threshold you set. Measure sprawl as the gap between seats billed and seats with a recent login, and track that gap over time rather than once — a single clean-up before renewal fixes the invoice for a year while leaving the process that produced the problem completely intact.