Shelfware

Shelfware is software an organisation is paying for but not using. It ranges from a handful of unused seats on an otherwise active tool to entire subscriptions that renew year after year with no active users.

Shelfware is one of the easiest costs to cut, because removing it has no operational impact. The hard part is finding it, which is where an accurate register and clear ownership help.

A team buys 40 seats of a tool at £12 per seat per month. Two years later 22 people use it: leavers were never removed, and a project that needed eight seats finished. The 18 unused seats cost £216 a month, which is £2,592 a year for nothing. Nobody sees that figure, because the invoice shows one line for 40 seats and it has not changed, so there is nothing on it that looks wrong.

That is the shape of most shelfware. It is rarely one obviously wasteful purchase. It is a seat count set at the high-water mark of a team that has since changed, on four or five tools at once, renewing quietly.

Unused seats on a live tool are the common one and the easier fix: the product is genuinely needed, the count is simply stale, and a renewal is the natural moment to reset it. Whole subscriptions nobody owns are rarer and more expensive. They usually belong to someone who has left, renew on a card or a purchase order nobody reviews, and survive precisely because no one person is accountable for asking whether they are still needed.

A record has a field for each of the two things shelfware turns on: an owner, and a seat count kept with the licence details. Neither is compulsory, which is exactly why they are worth filling in when the tool is added rather than during a cost-cutting exercise. The register carries an owner column by default and an annualised cost column you can add beside it, and it filters by owner, which makes a tool nobody is named against visible as a row rather than as an absence.

The Expenditure report then groups that spend by category, business unit and customer, so an unused tool shows up as a cost attached to a team, which is the form in which somebody will actually act on it. Renewal reminders give you the date to act by: the cheapest moment to drop seats is the one before the next term starts.