The Cost of Doing Nothing: Why Manual Access Management Is Risky, Wasteful, and Slowing You Down

Doing Nothing Isn't Neutral—It's Expensive
When it comes to provisioning and deprovisioning, most companies still rely on:
- Checklists
- Slack messages
- Shared spreadsheets
- Or, worse… hoping someone remembers to “clean things up”
And that’s not just a process issue. It’s a business risk and a budget leak.
Here’s what “doing nothing” really costs you.
Time You Don’t Have
Manual provisioning (setting up accounts and access across apps) and manual deprovisioning (removing that access) takes time—especially if you’re logging into 10–15 different tools per employee.
Let’s say it takes:
- 30 minutes to onboard someone
- 20 minutes to offboard someone
- You’re onboarding/offboarding just 10 people per month
That’s 8+ hours per month—a full workday—gone. And that doesn’t include chasing people for approvals or dealing with forgotten tasks weeks later.
For IT teams of one (or overstretched ops folks), that’s time you could be using to fix issues, improve security, or just breathe.
License Waste (a Silent Budget Killer)
When someone leaves the company, how often are all their licenses actually revoked?
Spoiler: rarely.
Whether it's Figma, Notion, Salesforce, or Slack, orphaned accounts add up fast.
Let’s do a quick napkin math:
- 10 unused licenses at $25/month = $250/month
- That’s $3,000/year, per app
- Multiply that by 3–5 apps? You’re easily leaking $10K–$15K/year in unused SaaS spend
All because someone didn’t get deprovisioned properly.
Compliance Risk You Can't Afford
If you're SOC 2, ISO 27001, or HIPAA-bound, auditors will ask:
- Who had access to what?
- When did they get access?
- Who approved it?
- Was it removed in time?
If you’re managing access by hand, in a spreadsheet or Slack thread, good luck tracking that down quickly.
Doing nothing means scrambling during audit season.
And scrambling means stress, gaps, and potential findings.
MSFT and Google SSO is a great start, but…
It doesn’t manage what access your users have to inside tools. And it definitely doesn’t:
- Automatically grant the right access on day one
- Revoke licenses when someone leaves
- Track approvals and role changes
- Run clean, repeatable offboarding workflows
SSO is just the front door.
You still need to manage the keys to every room inside.
What’s the Alternative?
You don’t need a huge security budget or a heavy-handed IT platform like Okta to fix this.
With tools like YeshID, you can:
- Orchestrate (and automate) your onboarding and offboarding across your apps
- Create reusable approval workflows without building from scratch
- Track who has access to what, and when it was approved
- Save hours every month and thousands in SaaS waste
And yes—it works with Google Workspace and Microsoft 365.
The Real Cost of Doing Nothing

Want to See What It’s Costing You?
Use our ROI Calculator to see how much time and money you could save by automating access with YeshID.
Doing nothing may feel easier in the moment—but over time, it’s the most expensive decision you can make.