How do I remove 'INACTIVE' users from our JIRA Cloud instance?

[nudo]

Currently, we have a lot of 'INACTIVE' users in our JIRA instance. I don't know how this affects our billing. I reckon it only make sense to have 'ACTIVE' users in the system.

If I want to permanently remove these 'INACTIVE' users from the system, how do I do that?

Thanks

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

They don't count towards your user count, so there's no billing impact (ok, a few bytes on your disks towards your 25Gb or 100Gb limit, but less than it takes to upload a word document or a small picture)

You can delete Inactive users if you want.  Unless they have interacted with JIRA in some ways, in which case, you need to keep them in order to avoid damaging your issue history and information.

[nudo]

Thanks for this.

I would like to know how we get billed and whether the number of users in the system has no bearing on that, realised you scratched this in your comment above?

The bigger problem is that we think by sanitising the system and removing INACTIVE users we will be saving on our account.

I will appreciate a careful explanation of how we get billed for our usage.

Thanks again,

Kingsley

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

I've no idea what you mean by "scratched this in your comment".

You are billed on the tier of user numbers that you have.  See https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/pricing?tab=host-in-the-cloud

Inactive users do not count towards your licence count.  For example, if you have a 25 user licence, you can have up to 25 active users.  That's it.  Inactive users are irrelevant.

[Robert Massaioli _Atlassian_]

Nic is giving excellent advice. Just leave the inactive users in the system but inactive; there are not many good reasons to delete users and I don't think there are any good reasons to delete users once they have worked in the products.

[nudo]

I don't seem to understand how JIRA defines a 'usr' or 'account' in the system. The following sections from the link you sent me:

"What is a JIRA Software user?

A JIRA Software user is any user that can log in to JIRA Software. Anonymous users may also be granted access and do not count against license totals.

How is my usage calculated?

You can add and remove users as your team changes. We'll make sure you are charged for the right user tier based on your team size. At the end of each billing month, you will be billed for the following month's subscription based the number of JIRA Software users you have."

seem to indicate that any account created equates to a user, which by that means both ACTIVE and INACTIVE users / accounts will count to your license.

I stand to be corrected, but we are on a Monthly subscription for 500-2000 user tier, which means we stand to pay less when we have less than 500 accounts in the system or more if we have over 2000 users.

Can you please validate my assertions?

Also, is there a way we can know which of these users are linked to projects so we can keep them and delete those that never used the system and are also not linked to any issues?

Thanks

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

This bit:

>A JIRA Software user is any user that can log in to JIRA Software

Inactive users can NOT log in.  So they won't be counted.

Cloud billing should automatically drop you down to the 500 tier if your number of active users remains below 500 for the month.

There is no way to know if a user is linked to a project other than by looking at the group and role membership in the projects.

Frankly, I'd forget it, deleting unused users doesn't reduce your costs or space usage beyond a few bytes, the effort isn't worth it. 

[Martin Cleaver]

It's not the full story as inactive users can't become Service Desk Customers. https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Jira-questions/Current-user-is-not-active/qaq-p/87778

[Joe Pitt]

As Nic said, don't delete them if they ever performed any action besides view on any issue. JIRA doesn't put the text of their name in the history, it puts a pointer to their user entry. So if you delete the user you will break the history display and get a SQL error when trying to display the issue going forward.