The active-user audit, the re-sizing exercise.

The audit methodology.

The active-user audit is the buyer-side discipline for reading the deployed seat count against the contracted seat count. The methodology has four steps: extract the user inventory; apply the login screen; apply the role-criticality screen; build the inactive cohort. The output is the seats that can be removed at renewal, the seats that can be repurposed mid-cycle and the boundary cases that require the qualitative read.

The audit applies to every per-user SKU in the Salesforce contract: Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud Engagement, Account Engagement, Tableau, Slack, MuleSoft, Field Service, CPQ, Revenue Cloud and the platform licences. The wider Sales Cloud editions spoke reads the edition-mix decision that flows from the audit.

The ninety-day login.

The ninety-day login is the first-pass screen. The query: select all users with an active licence, ordered by last login date. The users with no login in the last ninety days are the first-pass inactive candidates. The ninety-day window is the conservative inactive boundary; the one-hundred-eighty-day window is the strong-evidence inactive boundary.

The query is run against the User object. The fields are Id, Username, IsActive, LastLoginDate, ProfileId, RoleId, ManagerId, UserType and the Department field. The user-extract is the inventory baseline. The wider permission-set drift spoke reads the access surface that pairs with the user identity.

The role-criticality screen.

The login test is necessary but not sufficient. A user can log in once a week, see the daily-pulse dashboard, and never transact against the org. The role-criticality screen reads the productive use: the record edits, the case-touch count, the opportunity updates, the activity creation.

The query: select users with one or more login in the last ninety days but zero record-edits in the same window. These are the lower-confidence inactive candidates that require the qualitative read against the role. A field-sales role that logs in to read a dashboard but does not edit records is potentially productive (the dashboard read is the productive activity); a back-office role with the same profile is not.

The qualitative read is the role-by-role conversation with the business unit owner. The wider Sales Cloud editions spoke reads how the role-criticality screen feeds the edition-mix decision (the lighter-touch role often migrates to a lower edition rather than being removed).

The inactive-cohort write-down.

The inactive-cohort write-down is the renewal-cycle evidence. The cohort is the set of users that fail both the login screen and the role-criticality screen, less the boundary cases that the qualitative read returns to active. The size of the cohort is the buyer-side basis for the renewal-cycle seat reduction.

A two-hundred-seat inactive cohort against a thousand-seat deployment is the basis for a twenty-percent seat reduction at renewal. The reduction is recorded on the Order Form as a seat-count line reduction; the wider Order Form anatomy spoke reads the line-item geometry.

The Salesforce account team will push back on the reduction. The common pushbacks are the implementation-roadmap argument (the seats are reserved for a planned deployment); the M&A argument (the seats absorb an inbound acquisition); the policy argument (the role still requires a seat for compliance). The buyer-side counter is the timing argument: the seat can be added back when the future use case materialises; the seat does not need to be pre-paid against the speculative use case.

The audit cadence.

The audit cadence is twice-yearly. The mid-cycle review is at month six of the contract year. The purpose is the optimisation moment: the seats that can be repurposed via reassignment (the inactive seat goes to a new user under the seat-reassignment policy), the edition migrations that can be executed at the next true-up.

The pre-renewal review is at month nine of the contract year (or three months ahead of the contract anniversary). The purpose is the negotiation evidence: the seat-by-seat inactive cohort, the role-criticality findings, the size-of-reduction case. The wider Salesforce renewal cycle spoke reads the nine-month timeline that frames the audit.

The wider seat reassignment policy spoke reads the policy clause that governs how inactive seats can be reassigned mid-cycle without a new licence purchase.

The renewal evidence.

The renewal-cycle evidence pack is the audit output documented as a defensible artefact. The pack includes: the user-extract baseline (the inventory at the audit moment), the inactive-cohort schedule (the failed-login and failed-role-criticality users by department and by role), the qualitative-read findings (the boundary cases returned to active and the reasons), the proposed seat-reduction schedule (by SKU, by edition, by department) and the alternative-edition schedule (the seats that move to a lower edition rather than being removed).

The evidence pack is the buyer-side defence against the account-team pushback. The pack converts the seat-reduction case from a negotiating position to a documented operating decision. The wider Salesforce FinOps spoke reads the ongoing seat-hygiene discipline that makes the twice-yearly audit easier to execute.