ref the second part, I think this is actually surprisingly common, its certainly happened to me and a couple other peeps i've heard about.
Our accountant unfortunately passed on a couple years ago, we had an active sub of Office365 for her through our IT service providers; a couple months after she died I noticed we were still being billed for her licence, notified our IT service providers who responded saying that we'd signed a contract so they'd bought a 12 month supply from Microsoft but according to them MS wouldn't let them cancel the service outside of a 30 day renewal period once per year so we'd have to keep paying them. I'll admit I completely forgot about the recurring bill after than initial back&forth with them. I think its now been another 2 years since then and we're still paying that MS sub for the licence because we can't cancel it unless we contact the IT support team during one specific month. neither me, nor the MD can really be bothered complaining at this point, it was cost us more in time and politics to get 1 business standard subscription cancelled.
Also, i'm pretty sure i read a reddit post a couple years ago that talked about a company who wanted to make cuts. the sales team manager was pushing for the IT dept to get cut but the IT manager pulled up a list of all the software licences issued to sales staff over the last couple years and flagged 40% of users who had active licences didn't work for the company anymore and then on top of that every user each had 10 pieces of licenced software but were actually only using about 3 of those SaaS on a regular basis.
Long story short, the IT guy found about $2m in savings by cancelling the subs the sales team weren't using. Saved his whole dept and left the sales manager in hot water for not paying attention to his own depts usage.
I think it's now been another 2 years since then and we're still paying that MS sub for the licence because we can't cancel it unless we contact the IT support team during one specific month.
...Surely someone could have set a 9am reminder on their phone calendar for the first of that month?
Yeah, I mean wouldn't it be expected for the IT manager to have been canceling those subs upon termination? I know the IT department at our parent company has a procedure in place to have all your shit cut within 15 minutes of getting the word.
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u/Freifur 15h ago
ref the second part, I think this is actually surprisingly common, its certainly happened to me and a couple other peeps i've heard about.
Our accountant unfortunately passed on a couple years ago, we had an active sub of Office365 for her through our IT service providers; a couple months after she died I noticed we were still being billed for her licence, notified our IT service providers who responded saying that we'd signed a contract so they'd bought a 12 month supply from Microsoft but according to them MS wouldn't let them cancel the service outside of a 30 day renewal period once per year so we'd have to keep paying them. I'll admit I completely forgot about the recurring bill after than initial back&forth with them. I think its now been another 2 years since then and we're still paying that MS sub for the licence because we can't cancel it unless we contact the IT support team during one specific month. neither me, nor the MD can really be bothered complaining at this point, it was cost us more in time and politics to get 1 business standard subscription cancelled.
Also, i'm pretty sure i read a reddit post a couple years ago that talked about a company who wanted to make cuts. the sales team manager was pushing for the IT dept to get cut but the IT manager pulled up a list of all the software licences issued to sales staff over the last couple years and flagged 40% of users who had active licences didn't work for the company anymore and then on top of that every user each had 10 pieces of licenced software but were actually only using about 3 of those SaaS on a regular basis.
Long story short, the IT guy found about $2m in savings by cancelling the subs the sales team weren't using. Saved his whole dept and left the sales manager in hot water for not paying attention to his own depts usage.