What happens when I delete a user?
What happens to my billing when I delete a user?
Your commitment to Google is on an annual basis, and you will renew that commitment once every 12 months. This is regardless of your payment terms, monthly or annually. We do this because a monthly commitment pricing (flexible) is 17-20% more than an annual commitment.
This commitment is for the number of licenses at your anniversary. When you delete a user that will free up a license, but you do not get a credit for it because it is unused.
However, you will now have a license spare and be able to use that when you add a staff member in the future, and you won't get an invoice for it.
How do I delete a user?
We can help you manage the data of a departing user by migrating it to another account - complete this form to request deletion and migration of Google Workspace user data.
Note that once a deletion is complete you have ~30 days to recover the account if data is missing for some reason. After that, it's gone.
If you need a backup just in case (and we recommend you do not just for this scenario) check out our Cloud Backup product.
Request user deletion and migration
When should I request a deletion?
If possible request complete the form above at least the day before you need it to happen. You can specify a date and time for the user to have access terminated and we'll do our best to hit that time exactly for you. If you have an urgent need to terminate access then please give us a call or use live chat at the time.
What do we do when we delete a user?
Yes you can go into the Admin console and delete a user yourself. There are several other things that are hard (or impossible) to do in the console that we do for you:
- We set the security settings to be able to migrate email if you request it.
- Migrate Calendar (if requested)
- Migrate Google Drive (if requested)
- Deprovision any access tokens used on third party applications (i.e. via the Login with Google button)
- Forces a logout of any phones / tablets / browser windows
- Remote wipe any Organisational data from phones / tablets
- Sets up forwarding of new email to the destination user (if email migration requested) so that no new email is lost whilst migrating
- Adds the old user name to the destination user as an alias (if email migration requested) so that no email to the old user is lost in the future
How long does data migration take?
That is entirely related to how much data the user has in their account. It can take minutes, or days if there is a lot of email and drive data.
Can I delete a user myself?
Yes of course - Any account owner (Super Administrator or with Delete User rights) can go into admin.google.com and delete a user at any time. We recommend using our service because its much more comprehensive in terms of data and security than doing it yourself via the dashboard.
