Cleaning Up Licenses After Employees Leave

Why do departed employees keep costing you a software license?

When someone leaves, their account and the paid license attached to it don't disappear on their own. Unless someone removes the license, the business keeps paying for a seat nobody uses, and the old account stays a way in. A regular review that matches licenses against who has actually left closes both gaps.

I've spent 30 years in IT, and I'd rather show you than tell you. Here's how this works for one of our clients, with names and details left out because this story belongs to them.

What was the problem?

Employees who had left the company were still holding paid Microsoft 365 licenses. Nothing was broken. It's the kind of thing that builds up quietly when departures and license records aren't checked against each other.

How does the review work?

On a regular schedule, we check the client's own record of who has left against the accounts in their Microsoft 365 setup. For each departed person, we do three things, in this order:

• Move their OneDrive files into SharePoint, so the company keeps the work.
• Convert their mailbox to a shared mailbox, so the right people can still reach the mail.
• Remove the license, last, once the files and mail are safe.

The order is the point. The license is the easy part to remove. The careful part is making sure nothing the company needs goes with it.

What was the result?

Licenses were removed for every departed user on the client's list, and we let the client's contact know when it was done. Because it's a regular routine and not a one-time cleanup, new departures get handled on the next pass instead of piling up.

What should you ask your own IT provider?

Who compares your license list to your departures, and how often? What happens to a departed person's files and mail before the license comes off? If nobody can answer, you've found the gap, and it's fixable. Trust, yet verify.

Always on watch, Tom