How much are you spending on software licenses that no one is using? ActivTrak for BI - Technology License Optimization gives IT, finance, and operations leaders a clear, data-driven view of how technology investments are actually being utilized—so you can eliminate waste, right-size licenses, and make smarter purchasing decisions.
- Identify unused or underutilized software licenses across your organization
- Quantify potential savings from optimizing license counts in concrete dollar terms
- Track application usage trends over time to inform renewal and procurement decisions
- Compare active users against owned licenses to spot over-provisioning and gaps
- Build data-backed documentation for vendor negotiations and budget planning
Available to customers with an ActivTrak paid package and the ActivConnect API (Add-on), this report empowers IT leaders, finance teams, and procurement professionals to optimize technology spend across the organization by replacing guesswork with real usage data from ActivTrak.
To access ActivTrak for BI - Technology License Optimization, please refer to our platform-specific BI Template Setup Guide:
Tip: Save this report in your BI workspace for quick access and consider publishing it to your organization's BI service for broader visibility across IT, finance, and procurement teams.
Contents
- The challenge you're facing
- How to solve it
- How to read this report
- Practical applications
- Learn more
The challenge you're facing
Managing technology spend at scale introduces several interconnected challenges that this report is designed to address. ActivTrak for BI - Technology License Optimization report is designed to solve these challenges by combining ActivTrak's application usage data with your license and cost information—giving you the insights you need to optimize technology spend and maximize the return on your software investments.
- License waste and over-provisioning: Organizations routinely pay for more software licenses than they need. Licenses are provisioned when employees join or request access, but rarely reclaimed when usage drops off or roles change. Over time, this creates a growing gap between what you own and what your teams actually use—a gap that directly hits your bottom line. Without usage data, there's no efficient way to identify which licenses to reclaim, downgrade, or eliminate.
- Limited visibility into actual usage: Most organizations know how many licenses they own for each application, but not how many people are actively using them—or how intensively. A license that's accessed once a month has very different value than one used for hours every day. Without this depth of usage intelligence, IT and finance teams can't make informed decisions about renewals, upgrades, or consolidation opportunities.
- Weak negotiating position for renewals: When renewal time arrives, most organizations negotiate from a position of incomplete information. They know what they're paying, but not what they're actually consuming. This makes it difficult to push back on price increases, right-size agreements, or justify switching vendors. Concrete usage data transforms these conversations from opinion-based to evidence-based.
How to solve it
The Technology License Optimization report answers the key questions that drive smarter technology spending:
- Which applications are being used—and by whom? The Technology License & Optimization report shows you every user who has activity in a selected application or category, along with how many days they've been active and how much time they spend per day. This tells you not just whether an application is being used, but how deeply it's adopted across your workforce.
- How many licenses are we paying for vs. actually using? The License Usage % metric compares your active user count against your owned license count for each application. When usage exceeds 100%, you may have a compliance risk. When it's well below 100%, you have immediate savings opportunities. This single metric powers your most impactful cost-optimization decisions.
- Where are the biggest savings opportunities? The Technology Usage - Saving Opportunities page ranks applications by their potential savings—the cost of licenses that aren't being actively used. This prioritized view tells you exactly where to focus your optimization efforts for maximum financial impact.
- How are usage patterns trending over time? The Usage Trend chart tracks daily usage volume (average minutes per user) alongside user count over time. This helps you identify seasonal patterns, adoption trends for new tools, and declining usage that signals an opportunity to reduce licenses before the next renewal.
- How much could we save by right-sizing our licenses? The Potential Savings metric calculates the dollar value of unused licenses across your portfolio. This gives you a concrete, defensible number to bring to budget discussions, vendor negotiations, and executive reviews.
How to read this report
ActivTrak for BI - Technology License Optimization includes two report pages, Technology & License Optimization and Technology Usage - Saving Opportunities, each designed to provide a different perspective on your technology investments.
Glossary: ActivTrak for BI - Technology License Optimization
For a deep dive into each of the terms and metrics found in ActivTrak for BI - Technology License Optimization report, check out the supporting Glossary.
Technology & License Optimization
This is your primary dashboard for understanding how technology investments are utilized across your organization. It combines user-level activity data with license and cost metrics to give you a complete picture of application usage and spending efficiency.
Focus your attention
The Technology License & Optimization page can be customized using the filter controls at the top of the page:
- Group: Filter by specific teams or departments
- User: Filter to a specific user
- Day Type: Filter by day type (e.g., Weekday)
- Date: Specify the time range for your analysis
- Category: Filter by application category to analyze usage across groups of related tools
- Application Name: Filter to a specific application
The big picture
The Overview section displays seven headline numbers that provide your top-level technology spend and usage summary at a glance: Total Users, Owned Licenses, Total Cost of Ownership, Active App Users, Avg. Active Hrs/Day, Days Since Last Activity, and Potential Savings.
Example: Your organization has 938 total users who appeared in the selected date range, 6200 owned licenses at a total cost of ownership of $1M annually. Of those users, 938 were actively using the selected applications, averaging 1.8 active hours per day. The most recent activity was 3 days ago, and the potential savings from right-sizing licenses is $97,876.
Users with Activity during Time Range
The user-level activity table lists every individual who used the selected application or category, with three key data points for each: Days with Activity, Days Since Last Activity, and Duration Hours/Day.
What to look for: Sort by Days Since Last Activity to find users who haven't used an application recently—these may be candidates for license reclamation. Sort by Duration Hours/Day to identify your heaviest and lightest users, which can inform tiering decisions (e.g., downgrading light users to a less expensive plan).
Example: Lance H. has only 10 days with activity and averages just 0.7 hours/day, while Jeffrey A. has 17 days with activity and averages 1.1 hours/day. This contrast helps you distinguish consistent, engaged users from occasional, light users when deciding which licenses to retain.
Usage Trend
The Usage Trend chart displays two metrics over time on a dual-axis view: Avg. Mins per User/Day (light blue bars) and User Count (blue line). This visualization helps you understand both how many people are using an application and how intensively they're using it on a daily basis.
What to look for: A declining User Count with stable minutes per user may indicate the application is becoming niche but still valuable to its remaining users. Declining minutes per user with a stable user count may suggest the application is losing relevance even among those who still access it. Both declining together is a strong signal to consider reducing licenses or sunsetting the tool.
Technology Usage - Saving Opportunities
This page is your action-oriented savings dashboard, designed to help you quickly identify where the biggest license optimization opportunities exist. It prioritizes applications by their potential financial impact and provides the detailed data you need to justify reclamation or right-sizing decisions.
Focus your attention
The Technology Usage - Saving Opportunities page can be customized using the filter controls at the top of the page:
- Group: Filter by specific teams or departments
- User: Filter to a specific user
- Day Type: Filter by day type (e.g., Weekday)
- Date: Specify the time range for your analysis
Top Applications With Saving Opportunities
A horizontal bar chart ranks your Applications by Unused License Cost, making it immediately clear where the biggest savings opportunities exist. The applications with the longest bars represent your highest-priority targets for license optimization.
Example: Cursor and MS Office show the largest potential savings at $48K and $47K respectively, followed by Grammarly at $29K. This tells you Cursor and MS Office should be your first optimization targets, as together they account for the majority of your unused license spend—far outpacing smaller opportunities like Zoom ($12K), Slack ($9K), and 1Password ($7K).
User vs. Avg. Activity Hrs/Day
A supplementary user list on the right side of the page shows each user's Avg. Activity Hrs/Day, helping you identify your heaviest and lightest application users. Clicking on a specific user recalculates the two tables on the report page, filtering the details to show that individual's usage patterns—so you can drill into a single person's activity history and duration trends without losing sight of the broader chart.
License Utilization & Cost
This table provides a complete breakdown of each application's license utilization and financial metrics, including Application Name, Active Users, License Count, License Usage %, Annual Cost / Users, Cost of Ownership, and Potential Savings. Applications are grouped by parent product, with individual URLs or components listed beneath each grouping. Click the sign to the left of a product to expand and view individual applications.
What to look for: Pay attention to the License Usage % column. Values above 100% indicate more active users than owned licenses—a potential compliance risk that may require purchasing additional seats. Values well below 100% indicate over-provisioning and immediate savings opportunities. The Potential Savings column translates these gaps into dollar terms.
Example: Zoom and Slack both show 94% license usage—938 active users against 1,000 owned licenses—yet still generate $12,400 and $9,300 in potential savings, respectively, since even a small gap between active users and licenses adds up at scale. In contrast, Grammarly sits at 80% usage (796 active users against 1,000 licenses) but shows a larger $29,376 in potential savings, driven by a higher per-user annual cost of $144.00. This shows that usage percentage alone doesn't tell the full story—cost per license matters just as much.
Practical applications
Preparing for license renewals
Use this report to build a data-driven renewal strategy:
- Audit current usage: Before any renewal, filter to the specific application and review both the License Usage % and user-level activity data to understand your true consumption
- Right-size the agreement: If License Usage % is well below 100%, negotiate for fewer seats at renewal. If it's above 100%, plan for additional licenses to avoid compliance risk
- Negotiate with evidence: Bring the Usage Trend chart and License Utilization data to vendor conversations to support your position with concrete usage metrics
Conducting a technology portfolio review
Use the Saving Opportunities page to prioritize your optimization efforts:
- Rank by impact: Start with the applications showing the highest Potential Savings—these are your biggest opportunities for cost recovery
- Identify redundancies: Compare usage across applications in the same category to spot tools with overlapping functionality where you may be able to consolidate
- Monitor adoption of new tools: Track the Usage Trend for recently deployed applications to ensure adoption is meeting expectations and justify the investment
Reclaiming unused licenses
Build a systematic process for reclaiming licenses from inactive users:
- Set inactivity thresholds: Establish a policy (e.g., 30 days of no activity) that triggers a license reclamation review
- Identify candidates: Use the Days Since Last Activity column in the user table to find users who haven't accessed the application within your threshold
- Verify before reclaiming: Reach out to inactive users to confirm they no longer need access before removing the license—some roles may have seasonal or periodic usage patterns
Pro Tip: Schedule a quarterly review of this report to stay ahead of license waste. Organizations that regularly monitor technology utilization typically reduce their software spend through license reclamation, tier optimization, and better-informed renewal negotiations.