Finance often equates a paid seat with an active engineer. In practice, many seats belong to people who authenticated once during onboarding and never opened the secondary tracker again. That gap is where tool consolidation decisions go sideways.
During audits we ask for three numbers side by side: licensed seats, accounts with at least one meaningful action in thirty days, and accounts with repeated weekly use. The middle number is where arguments start. Meaningful actions must be defined per tool—opening a ticket is not the same depth as completing a review cycle.
If your application analytics only exports seat totals, treat them as cost inputs, not adoption proof. Pair them with event definitions your engineers would recognize from their own week. Otherwise leadership debates license prices while the real friction sits in a plugin nobody can find after the last IDE upgrade.