Salesforce license costs rarely spike. They creep. A departed employee here, a duplicate permission set license there, a full license where a platform license would do — none of it visible on any dashboard, all of it renewing annually.
License waste survives because nobody owns the review. It is everyone’s line item and no one’s job.
Where the waste hides
Inactive users still holding licenses — the classic, and still the biggest. Users licensed at a tier their actual usage does not justify. Add-on products purchased for a project that ended. Integration users consuming full licenses where an integration license would serve.
Each category is findable in an afternoon with login history and permission data. The obstacle is never the analysis; it is that the analysis has no owner.
The structured pass
Score every license by three questions: is the user active, does their usage match their tier, and does the business process they support still exist? Rank the findings by annual cost. Present one page to whoever owns the Salesforce budget.
In a recent manufacturing engagement, this review — alongside a manual-process audit — identified roughly $100K in annual savings. The first hour of the review had already paid for it.
Make it a habit, not a project
A license review that happens once is a windfall; scheduled quarterly, it is a control. Put it on the same calendar as your release gates — it is the same discipline, applied to spend instead of risk.