Every user you add to a workspace is also a potential entry point. As teams grow and churn, accounts accumulate — contractors finish projects, employees change roles, and trial seats are never reclaimed. Without an active process for identifying and deactivating these inactive users, your workspace carries hidden access risk and wasted license spend indefinitely.
Inactive user management is the practice of detecting accounts that have fallen out of use, verifying they should no longer have access, and revoking that access in a way that is auditable and reversible. For monday.com and Atlassian administrators, this is not a one-time cleanup but an ongoing discipline. The goal is a workspace where every active seat maps to a real, current member of your team, and every departed member's access has been cleanly retired.
The business impact goes beyond security. Unused seats on monday.com and Atlassian products like Jira and Confluence are billed the same as active ones, so dormant users quietly inflate your subscription costs. A regular deactivation cadence keeps your license count honest, which is especially valuable for organizations that must justify seat spend to finance or pass periodic access reviews during compliance audits.
Four practices to start with
Identify inactive users regularly
Review your account for users who have not logged in for 30, 60, or 90 days. Dormant accounts are a leading source of unauthorized access because no one notices when they are quietly misused.
Deactivate, don't just remove
Deactivating a user preserves their history and audit trail while revoking access. This is safer than deletion and keeps your compliance records intact.
Automate the cleanup cadence
Manual reviews get skipped under deadline pressure. Schedule automated daily or weekly runs so inactive users are flagged and deactivated on a predictable rhythm.
Keep an audit log
Record who was deactivated, when, and why. An audit log proves compliance during reviews and gives you a rollback path if a active user was caught by mistake.
Why automation matters
Manual reviews are the most common reason inactive user management slips. Administrators intend to review access monthly, but competing priorities push the review back until an audit or a security incident forces it. By then, months of dormant accounts have accumulated. Automating the detection and deactivation cycle — with configurable inactivity thresholds and group-based rules — turns a forgotten chore into a reliable, scheduled process that runs whether or not anyone remembers it.
A good automation tool also protects accounts you want to keep. A blocklist ensures that service accounts, shared mailboxes, and admins are never accidentally deactivated, even if they appear inactive. This balance — aggressive cleanup of real dormant users, safe protection of accounts that should stay — is what separates a mature inactive user process from a risky one.