Microsoft 365 License Optimization Subscription

A recurring monthly service that keeps your Microsoft 365 licensing right-sized: a monthly usage-versus-assignment review from Microsoft Graph reporting, joiner and leaver license hygiene, duplicate and overlapping add-on detection, a maintained renewal calendar with New Commerce term planning, savings recommendations with exact switch mechanics, execution of the assignment changes you approve, and a quarterly cost report. It is a flat $295 per month per tenant with no long-term commitment.

The audit is the deep dive: a one-week, fixed-price engagement that inventories everything, builds the right-sizing model across plan tiers, checks nonprofit and education eligibility, and delivers a dated savings plan. This subscription is the maintenance rhythm afterward — it assumes the model exists and keeps the tenant from drifting back. Most clients run the audit first; if you subscribe without one and the baseline shows structural waste, we will recommend the audit rather than stretch a monthly fee over it.

The free scan is a read-only automated pass that tells you whether there is licensing waste worth chasing. The audit finds and dates it. This subscription keeps it found. Honest guidance: start with the scan — if it surfaces little, neither the audit nor this subscription is the right spend yet, and we will say so.

No — not as a percentage, not as a target, not before the evidence. Every recommendation carries its own monthly delta so you can total the plan yourself, and the quarterly report measures realized savings after the fact from invoices. A number promised in advance would be marketing; this service is bookkeeping.

For leavers: once your offboarding signal arrives, the license is released or reassigned, the account's licensed state is reconciled, and the seat is either reused or queued for reduction at renewal. For joiners: new assignments are checked against the role-based license map agreed at onboarding, so a new hire gets the plan the role needs rather than whatever the last hire got. Dormant and blocked accounts still holding licenses are flagged every month regardless of signal.

A standalone add-on — Entra ID P1, a Defender plan, Visio, Project, extra storage — assigned to users whose suite already includes the same service plan. At the SKU level the two purchases look unrelated; at the service-plan level they collide and you pay twice for one capability. We work at the service-plan level because it is the only layer where this is visible.

Yes: reassignments, leaver cleanup, overlap removal on monthly-term add-ons, and the renewal plan itself. Seat reductions on annual terms land only inside Microsoft's short window after renewal, which is exactly why the calendar exists — a reduction missed there waits a full term. The subscription's job is to have the decision and the evidence ready before the window opens, not to discover the renewal after it closed.

Both, with a clear line. Assignment changes you approve — assign, unassign, reassign, group-based licensing corrections — are executed by us inside the cycle. Subscription-level changes — seat reductions, cancellations, term changes — are executed by whoever holds the billing relationship: us, on your instruction, where you buy through IT Partner; your CSP or Microsoft, with our exact instructions, where you do not.

Yes. The review needs reporting access and billing visibility, not a billing relationship. If you later want us to hold the billing so subscription changes can be executed directly, moving Microsoft 365 billing between CSP partners is a billing-side change under Microsoft's documented transfer process — no migration, no downtime — and it is free through our CSP billing switch. It is never a condition of this subscription.

No. Recommendations are yours regardless of who executes them, and there is no lock-in in either direction. Where clients do buy through us, subscriptions are at Microsoft's published list prices — our margin comes from Microsoft, not from a markup on you — and you can move billing away again under Microsoft's own transfer workflow.

Reading is read-only: usage reports and license assignments, never mailbox or file content. Executing approved assignment changes needs license assignment rights, requested through least-privilege GDAP that you approve — Microsoft's granular, time-bound partner access model. We never ask for standing Global Administrator, and our default access policy is published for you to compare against the request we send.

Spend by subscription reconciled to invoices, the trend since the baseline, every change made in the quarter with its note, recommendations accepted and declined, savings realized after the fact, and the renewals coming in the next quarter with the decisions they require. It is written for the finance owner who has to defend the Microsoft line and the IT owner who has to explain it.

No. Azure consumption is a different discipline covered by our Azure cost optimization services; third-party SaaS is outside the Microsoft ecosystem entirely. Pretending one monthly review covers all three shortchanges each.

A flat $295 per month for the tenant, invoiced monthly, with no long-term contract: stop any month, and all we ask is payment of previously approved invoices. Everything the service produced stays yours — the inventory, the renewal calendar, every memo and report.

The first cycle is onboarding: GDAP access, the report-privacy decision, the inventory and usage pull, billing reconciliation, and the renewal calendar. From the second cycle the service is in steady state. If we performed your license audit, the baseline already exists and onboarding is largely a handover to ourselves.