How to Reduce License Waste & Spend Less on Google Workspace

It's a common experience in the subscription era: reviewing a bill, only to realize you've been paying for a service for a year you only meant to use for a month. Whoops.

When it's your personal bills, that might add up to an extra expense of $15 a month for a streaming service. But when it's a professional application, a high number of unused licenses could easily lead to thousands of dollars in waste.

With 77% of businesses reporting a rise in costs in 2025, reducing license waste is an obvious way to improve your bottom line. But the work of tracking your licenses, identifying those that are unused, and canceling or re-assigning them can be a messy, tedious process for your administrative staff.

For your Google Workspace licenses at least, there are tools that make the work of cutting down on license waste more manageable.

The Hidden Cost of Inefficient Licensing

A Nexthink analysis of over six million anonymous devices found that roughly half of the software products installed went unused by employees. According to their estimates, that adds up to nearly $45 million a month in money wasted.

The more employees a company has, the harder it is to stay on top of how many software licenses you're paying for. And with so many subscription companies defaulting to automatic renewals, unused licenses can easily pile up until they're taking a huge bite out of your tech budget.

Google Workspace is a valuable product, but it's not immune from this issue. The Admin Console makes it difficult to efficiently keep track of license usage. Busy admins often lack the time and wherewithal to figure out how many of the licenses you're paying for are being used at all, much less how many are being used at the level you're paying for (for example, a user may have a Business Plus license, when Business Standard would suffice).

The solution isn't to start holding your admins to an impossible standard; it's to provide them with the tools to make streamlined Google Workspace license management possible. gPanel is a centralized platform with features that will help you take your Workspace license management from an opaque, complex process to a simple, data-driven one.

Identifying License Waste: Where the Money Disappears

The first step to right-sizing your Google Workspace license management is identifying which accounts have licenses they're not using to their potential.

This kind of Workspace waste tends to fall into a few different categories.

Dormant Accounts

One of the easiest types of license waste to cut — at least once you manage to identify them — is dormant accounts. Employee accounts can go dormant for a number of reasons. The most common is admins forgetting to delete an account after a former employee leaves (or just never getting around to it). Another could be temporary or test accounts that are set up for a particular, limited purpose, then never deleted once the test is complete.

Whatever the reason, if you can spot these accounts, you can recoup the costs they're incurring. Administrators can create license usage reports in the Admin Console to get a snapshot of accounts that aren't in use. That's a good start, but with gPanel, you get even more detailed reporting on account activity (or rather, a lack thereof). 

gPanel reports show usage data that goes beyond the last login, providing data on more meaningful usage activity like the last time the user sent an email, created a Drive file, or attended a Meet that goes even further back than Workspace's six-month limit. That detail can help you better identify the accounts that are truly dormant and can be archived or removed without consequences.

Wrong License Type

Removing dormant accounts is fairly straightforward, but identifying and correcting accounts that have the wrong license type requires a little more analysis and decision-making. When sussing these accounts out, there are a couple main things to look for:

• Underutilized Licenses: Google Workspace offers several different plans at different price points. If you have employees with licenses at the premium tiers who are only using the functionality of the lower tiers, you could potentially save a lot of money by downgrading them to the actual plan they need. gPanel makes it easier to track license types for each account, along with usage data for the particular features that account is taking advantage of.
  
  Once you identify accounts that aren't making full use of the plan you're paying for, you can save money by switching them to a more affordable license. You'll generally want to check in with the employee and their manager before downgrading them,  just to make sure the switch won't get in the way of their ability to manage their job responsibilities. But if you show them data that they're not using the costly features available to them now, they'll likely either commit to taking more advantage of the license they have or agree to moving to a more affordable option.
  
  
• Annual vs Flexible Licenses: Google offers both annual plans and flexible licenses with different terms and benefits. Annual plans provide a discount in exchange for a year-long commitment, while flexible plans let you add and remove licenses as needed. Deciding which option makes the most sense for your business can be complicated, as it requires analyzing and estimating your typical usage needs.
  
  gPanel's reporting features can help by keeping track of how often you're adding and removing users, how well your IT team stays on top of removing inactive users, and how many of the licenses you're currently paying for are in use. With that data, you can make more informed decisions about which type of plan is best for your bottom line.
  
  
• Active vs Archived User Licenses: If the idea of removing dormant accounts makes you nervous because you don't want to lose all the data attached to them, archived user (AU) licenses are your friend. AU licenses let you keep all the emails and files associated with a Workspace account without paying full price.
  
  AUs are an essential feature for highly regulated industries, where maintaining that data is required. But they're also a valuable option for any organization that needs continued access to the institutional knowledge stored in an employee's files and communications after they leave the job.
  
  

The gPanel Solution: Centralized Oversight & Action

While the Admin Console provides some features to help you identify license waste, you can spot and act on license savings opportunities much more efficiently with the help of gPanel.

Some of the main gPanel features that make a difference are:

Robust Reporting

IT teams could use spreadsheets and Admin Console reports to track data on which employees have which licenses and how their usage relates to their license tier. But trying to stay on top of that information manually when you only have access to limited native reports is likely to be a losing battle.

gPanel offers more detailed reporting on usage trends, as well as a more intuitive view for tracking the number of licenses you have and what they each cost. Between gaining access to more data and better visualizations of that data, your admins will have a much easier time staying on top of things and cutting license waste.

Centralized License Dashboard

Having to navigate between different screens to gain a full picture of your license data makes it harder to understand what's going on and make informed decisions. 

gPanel provides a single view that shows your current license counts, the number that are allocated versus the number used, and visibility into what they're all costing you. 

Usage-Based Audits

gPanel lets you run reports that flag accounts as "Inactive" or "Low-Activity" based on criteria you can set. That gives you a fast, easy snapshot of accounts that may be worth removing, archiving, or downgrading to a lower-cost tier.

Bulk License Downgrade or Removal

Identifying those accounts fast is one thing. But at large organizations, removing or downgrading them one by one manually could still be an overwhelming task. gPanel makes it easy to select a list of flagged inactive users and remove their licenses in bulk, all in one step. 

The same goes for downgrading accounts. You can select as many as you want and downgrade their plan in one action, eliminating tedious clicks.

Automated Offboarding Policy Enforcement

What's even easier than bulk removals? Not having to do the work of removing outdated accounts at all. gPanel provides offboarding automation features that ensure that once you offboard a user, their license will be automatically removed or archived within 30 days. 

Your IT team doesn't have to remember to take that extra step for you to enjoy the cost savings. It's done for them.

The Compliance Benefit

All of this can save you time and money, but it's not the only benefit. Having a clean, audited license count can help your organization maintain compliance. You don't want to realize too late that someone has access to data in Workspace that they shouldn’t by law, or risk losing data you're required to keep because an employee deleted an account they should have archived.

Taking advantage of gPanel's reports helps you make sure you're not only reducing license waste, but also restricting data access according to your security and regulatory responsibilities.  And automation features help your IT team avoid the kind of mistakes that are an inevitable part of being human.

Compliance is hard when it's one more thing on the shoulders of employees that already have a heavy load. It's a lot easier when you let tech handle much of the work for you.

Let gPanel Boost Your Budget

No one likes the feeling of being cheated. And it's even worse when you realize your own oversight is to blame. Google Workspace is a valuable product worth the cost — but only if you're paying for what you actually use. 

Use gPanel to stop overpaying for licenses you don't need, and watch your budget grow. If you're not using gPanel yet, we can show you the ropes with a free demo.