The Microsoft 365 licences most businesses pay for twice

Microsoft 365 licensing rewards attention and punishes drift. Tenants are usually set up correctly once, then grow for years without anybody revisiting the assumptions. These are the four findings that come up most often in licence reviews.

1. Leavers who never left

The most common finding, and the least interesting. Accounts for people who left are still licensed because offboarding removed their access but not their subscription. Worth checking before anything clever: it is usually the largest single number.

2. Third-party tools for things you already own

Separate subscriptions for backup, MFA, device management or email security are frequently duplicating capability already sitting inside a Business Premium or E3 plan. Sometimes the third-party product is genuinely better and worth keeping — but that should be a decision, not an accident.

3. Everyone on the same plan

Uniform licensing is administratively easy and often expensive. Frontline and shift-based staff who need email and Teams rarely need the full desktop suite. Splitting the estate by actual usage is unglamorous work that tends to pay for itself immediately.

4. Add-ons bought during a project and never removed

Migrations and compliance projects often justify a temporary add-on. The project ends, the add-on renews annually, and nobody reconciles it against the original reason.

How to check without a project

You do not need a consultant to start. Export the licence assignment report from the admin centre, sit it next to your leavers list and your list of other software subscriptions, and look for overlaps. Most of the value is in that one comparison. The harder question — whether a plan change is the right call given your compliance obligations — is where it is worth getting a second opinion.