How to tell dormant seats from quiet but necessary roles

When teams ask us to cut unused seats, the first instinct is to sort accounts by last login and reclaim anything below a threshold. That method catches obvious waste, but it also risks removing people who touch an application only at month-end close, audit windows, or during incident response.

We start by classifying roles before we classify people. A finance controller who opens a reconciliation application twelve times a year may look idle in a weekly chart and still be essential. A marketing analyst with daily logins who never opens the shared data catalog may look active while contributing little to platform value.

Practical signals help. Pair last-login with feature depth: which modules were touched, whether exports were generated, and whether the account participated in shared workspaces. Cross-check with calendar seasonality for the business unit. Ask owners to mark accounts as seasonal, break-glass, or candidate for reclaim before any cut is final.

Document confidence. When usage logs lack feature-level detail, say so. A reclaim list with three confidence bands — strong, provisional, needs interview — keeps renewals honest and protects teams from surprise lockouts after a blunt purge.