Most NZ businesses are paying for software nobody uses. Unused Microsoft 365 licences, forgotten SaaS subscriptions, and duplicate tools quietly drain IT budgets. Here's what a proper software asset audit reveals — and what to do about it.
A 40-person Auckland professional services firm recently asked Optimyze to audit their software licences before their annual Microsoft renewal. What we found: 11 unused Microsoft 365 Business Premium licences assigned to former employees, seven Salesforce seats with no login in over six months, four duplicate project management subscriptions from different departments buying tools independently, and three legacy software licences auto-renewing at $3,200/year for software the business had stopped using two years earlier.
Total annual waste: $47,800. The firm had no idea.
How Licence Waste Happens
Software licence waste is not a sign of poor management — it's a predictable consequence of how software is purchased and how businesses grow. Licences get bought by individual departments. Staff leave and their accounts are disabled but not decommissioned. A new tool gets adopted while the old one keeps auto-renewing. Cloud subscriptions grow without any single owner tracking the total spend.
In smaller businesses, software purchasing is often distributed — the marketing team buys their tools, operations buys theirs, and the managing director approves invoices without the context to question whether each tool is still in use. Nobody has a complete picture.
The Microsoft 365 Opportunity
Microsoft 365 is the single largest licence waste opportunity for most NZ businesses. The platform has multiple licence tiers — Business Basic, Business Standard, Business Premium, E3, E5 — with significant price differences between them. Businesses routinely overpay by assigning Business Premium (which includes Intune, Defender for Business, and Azure AD P1) to users who only need email and Office.
A right-sizing exercise — matching each user's licence tier to their actual needs — typically reduces Microsoft 365 spend by 15–25% without removing any functionality from the users who need it.
Microsoft's own licence optimisation tools within the Microsoft 365 Admin Center show licence assignment and usage data, but interpreting that data correctly and mapping it to the right licence tier requires someone who knows the platform well.
SaaS Subscription Sprawl
The average 50-person NZ business uses over 40 SaaS applications. Many of those applications were adopted by individuals or teams, charged to a credit card, and never reviewed again. When the person who originally signed up leaves, the subscription continues — and nobody else knows it exists or who to cancel it with.
Common culprits we find in software audits: project management tools (Asana, Monday, Notion, Trello — often multiple in the same business), video conferencing (Zoom and Teams both being paid for), design tools (Canva paid seats assigned to people who've never opened it), and storage solutions (Dropbox Business alongside SharePoint).
The Compliance Risk Nobody Mentions
Software licence waste creates compliance exposure in the other direction too — underlicensing. Businesses sometimes have more installations of a product than they have licences, often because someone installed software from an old installer file or because volume licence terms weren't correctly understood. A vendor audit finds underlicensing and issues a true-up invoice — sometimes for multiple years of arrears.
The Business Software Alliance estimates that around 25% of software installed in NZ businesses is unlicensed. The exposure isn't just financial — unlicensed software voids vendor support agreements and can breach cyber insurance policy requirements.
What a Software Asset Audit Covers
A proper software asset audit compares three things: what you're licensed for, what you've actually installed or provisioned, and what's actively being used. The gap between any of those three things represents either wasted spend or compliance risk.
Optimyze runs software asset audits as part of onboarding every new managed IT client — and we typically identify savings that offset a significant portion of the managed service cost in year one. Ongoing, we maintain a live software register that's updated automatically as licences are added, changed, or removed.
Software licence waste is not a technology problem — it's a visibility problem. You can't manage what you can't see. A single audit typically pays for itself many times over in the first year.
