Count the BI seats before the vendor does

BI licensing drifts in one direction. People join, seats get provisioned, people change roles, seats remain. The vendor's renewal quote is computed from the count, not the usage, and the count only ever grows.

The audit is two hours because the data already exists: every major BI platform logs last-login and content views (the pricing pages, Tableau's or Power BI's, tell you what each idle seat costs annually; the admin console tells you how many you have). Pull seats with no login in ninety days. The consistent finding across our engagements: fifteen to thirty percent of paid seats are dormant, and nobody disputes a dormant seat with a date on it.

The second finding is subtler and worth more: tier mismatch. Most platforms price creators at several multiples of viewers, and organizations habitually provision the expensive tier as a default courtesy. Cross-reference creator licenses against who actually published anything this quarter. Creators who only view are the renewal's largest silent line item.

Do the audit two months before the renewal, not after. Counts negotiated down at renewal save the multiple; counts trimmed mid-term usually just donate the remainder to the vendor's fiscal year.

And one governance note, because the audit tempts a bad sequel: do not weaponize view logs against individuals. The audit's unit is the seat, and its output is a purchase order, not a performance review. Keep it that way and finance will run it for you annually, which is the correct owner anyway.