Full narration of the briefing. Click a section heading to jump the player to that moment.
In every Microsoft renewal there are two versions of your estate. There is the one in the account team's deck, built from what you bought and what Microsoft would like you to buy next. And there is the one in your admin centre, built from what your people actually use. Those two numbers are never the same, and whichever one enters the room first sets the terms of the whole negotiation.
I am Tom, Claire is with me, and this briefing is how to build the second version before anyone shows you the first.
Start with three numbers per product, because most organisations only know the first. Purchased: what your enrolment entitles you to. Assigned: what is allocated to a named user in the tenant. And active: how many of those users actually did something in the last ninety days.
Purchased against assigned tells you what you are holding in reserve. Assigned against active tells you what you are paying for and nobody is using. In the estates we see, the gap between assigned and active runs anywhere from ten to thirty percent on the big suites, and every point of it is money leaving the business every month with nothing coming back.
Get it from your own systems. The Microsoft 365 admin centre gives you assigned licences and active usage by service, Entra gives you sign in activity, and your enrolment paperwork gives you the entitlement. Export all three, join them on the user, and refresh it quarterly rather than once at renewal. One discipline matters here more than any tool: do not ask the account team to produce this for you.
A usage report prepared by the party quoting you is not evidence, it is a sales document, and it will be shaped around what they would like the conversation to be about.
Four places to look, in order. Leavers: accounts still licensed after someone has gone, which is the fastest money to recover and the easiest to prove. Duplicates: users holding two suites, or a suite plus a standalone product the suite already includes. Over tiering: people on E5 who use none of the security or compliance that E5 is for, which is the single biggest line in most estates.
And the middle of the agreement, those Power BI, Teams Phone, Visio and Project lines that were bought for a project years ago and have renewed on autopilot ever since, usually with nobody internally who can name the owner.
Now turn it into a negotiating position, which takes one more step most people skip. Price the gap in annual dollars at your own net rate, per product, and total it. Not percentages, not seat counts. Dollars a year.
Two thousand dormant E3 seats at thirty nine dollars a month is a shade under a million dollars a year, and a million dollars a year is a number that changes who attends the meeting on your side and what they are prepared to do about it. Percentages get nodded at. Annual dollars get acted on.
One caution, because this file cuts both ways. Everything you share during the year gets priced into the renewal, so share deliberately. Your shelfware analysis is leverage when you present it as a reduction you intend to make, and it is a growth opportunity for them if you present it as a problem you would like help solving. The framing is not cosmetic.
It decides whether the meeting is about lowering your count or about attaching a new product to fix your adoption. Same data, two completely different renewals.
The move from this briefing: build the three column file this quarter, not at renewal. Purchased, assigned, active, with the annual dollar value of the gap beside each product, refreshed every quarter and owned by one named person. It takes a few days of work and it is the foundation under every other session in this series, because optimisation, tier decisions, Copilot sizing and the negotiation itself all run off it. Next session: E7, and whether that bundle is the right home for any of your users.
See you there.
Redress Compliance works on contingency: our fee is 25 percent of what we save you. Nothing saved, nothing paid. Independent, buyer side only, never vendor funded. Want Redress to contact you? Reach out and we respond the same day.
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