“Toggling” Salesforce User Licenses?

Question

We had some old admins accidentally move some data around and it changed the values in a User Lookup on one of our custom objects.

I can recover the history of the field, but a lot of the users are no longer with the company and have been deactivated.

I have a solution that would re-activate a user, re-assign the records and then deactivate the user in a single script. But I want to confirm that as long as I do this User by User and stay under our license count I won't be billed for the users I toggle on and off.

Answer 1

You should be good. As long as you stay under your license count you're fine. SFDC won't allow you to exceed the limit

Answer 2

You don't have to reactive the users, with Audit Fields and Update Records with Inactive Owners checked, admins can update owner and sharing-based fields on records with inactive owners. UI won't let you to select inactive user, you have to use data loader or any other tool.