Licensing & Commercial Optimisation
Pay for the capability
the organisation
actually needs.
EntitlementValue
Microsoft licensing can become difficult to understand as organisations add ERP, CRM, Power Platform, analytics, AI, users, environments and third-party solutions over time. The objective is not simply to reduce licence cost. It is to understand what people need to do, which capability enables it, what the organisation already owns, what it is actually using, and where cost, complexity or risk may be avoidable.
The right licence should follow the work a person needs to do, not the title they happen to have.
In short
The goal is not the cheapest licence. It is a defensible commercial position.
The work is understood, the access is appropriate, the entitlement is current, the evidence is recorded, the cost is justified, the business remains operable, and the estate does not drift back out of control.
The commercial sequence
- 01Start with the work, not the licence catalogue.
- 02Establish what is owned, assigned and actually used.
- 03Separate security permission from licence entitlement.
- 04Validate the platform-specific licensing requirement.
- 05Check indirect, external and device access.
- 06Separate unused capability from unadopted capability.
- 07Understand total operating cost, not only the licence line.
- 08Validate with the business before removing capability.
- 09Implement the commercial change so the cost actually moves.
- 10Govern joiners, movers, leavers and renewals so it does not drift back.
Licensing should reflect how the organisation operates. Not how the system happened to evolve.
A user may have been assigned a licence years ago because it was convenient. Their role may have changed. The platform may have changed. The process may have changed. The entitlement may no longer reflect the work they actually perform.
Role before licence
What does this person actually need to do?
Every credible licensing position starts with the work, then follows it through access and capability to entitlement.
Person
A named individual, not a headcount line.
Position / role
What the organisation asks them to do.
Business responsibilities
Create, approve, view, report, maintain, administer.
System security role
What the platform actually permits them to do.
Application capability
The functionality the work genuinely depends on.
Licence entitlement
The commercial consequence of everything above it.
- Do they create transactions, or only view them?
- Do they approve? At what level?
- Do they report, or consume reports somebody else builds?
- Do they manage customers, cases or opportunities?
- Do they work in warehouse, production or field operations?
- Do they maintain master data?
- Do they administer the system?
- Do they build or use Power Apps and automation?
- Do they access data platforms or AI capability?
- Start with the work. Not with the licence catalogue.
What the conclusion rests on
Licensing guidance is useful. The agreement is what binds.
Microsoft licensing guides explain the position. They are not themselves the contractual licensing agreement. A defensible recommendation states which level of evidence it used, and when.
1. Customer agreement and Microsoft Product Terms
The contractual licensing basis. Guidance documents explain it, they do not replace it.
2. Current Microsoft licensing guidance
The current product-specific licensing explanation for the capability in question.
3. Current Microsoft technical documentation
Admin, security and licence reporting documentation for the platform involved.
4. Tenant evidence
Users, assigned licences, security roles, environments, capacities and configuration.
5. Business role evidence
What the person or process is actually required to do.
A recommendation should state the evidence behind it and the date on which that evidence was valid.
InteliSense provides advisory interpretation using current sources. That is not legal advice, and it does not replace your agreement with Microsoft.
Decision record
Every material recommendation should be reproducible.
Not because the process demands paperwork, but because licensing positions are revisited at renewal, at acquisition and when the rules change.
- User or population, and the business responsibility behind it
- Platform, current access and security role where relevant
- Current licence and required capability
- Entitlement conclusion, with the official sources used
- Source version and the date the evidence was valid
- Assumptions made, stated plainly
- Recommendation, business owner, approval and commercial action
- Licensing advice should be reproducible, not dependent on somebody remembering why the decision was made
Where evidence comes from
No single report provides the whole licensing answer.
A review uses current native Microsoft evidence alongside application and business data. What is available in your environment sets the honest limit of what can be concluded.
- User Security Governance, where available in your environment
- Licence usage reporting for assigned versus required position
- Role, duty and privilege analysis, including custom roles
- Power Platform admin centre licence consumption information
What do you own?
Before buying more, understand the estate already in place.
Assigned does not always mean used. Used does not automatically mean correctly licensed. Both need evidence before anything is recommended.
- Business Central
- Dynamics 365 Finance, Supply Chain
- Dynamics 365 Sales, Customer Service, Field Service, Project Operations
- Power Apps, Power Automate, Dataverse, Power Pages
- Power BI and Microsoft Fabric
- Microsoft 365
- AI and Copilot-related capability
- ISVs and third-party tools
- Few organisations hold all of this. The point is to establish what is genuinely present.
Entitlement vs permission
Security is what a user can do. Licensing is what they are entitled to use.
The two need to align. Reviewing one in isolation is how organisations create either exposure or unexpected commercial risk.
Fix the role design
Broad security roles granted because “it was the easiest way to make the screen work” create exposure, licensing complexity and harder support.
Protect segregation of duties
A broader role structure can look commercially attractive while creating access combinations the organisation should not permit.
Review security and licence together
Changing one without the other is how compliance risk and access problems are introduced quietly.
Do not solve access problems by adding capability
Adding entitlement to work around a design flaw makes both the security model and the commercial model worse.
Joiners, movers, leavers
Licence optimisation should be a process, not an annual clean-up exercise.
Most drift is created quietly, one role change at a time.
Joiner
What role, what access, what licence.
Mover
What changed, what to add, what to remove.
Leaver
What access stops, what entitlement returns, what records reassign.
Review
A recurring process, not an annual clean-up.
A typical role change
The licence and the security model should be reviewed together.
Where the programme is
Where recovery takes it
Warehouse supervisor
Operations manager
Operational execution
Reporting and approval
Single-site visibility
Broader operational visibility
One application, one role
Possibly different application capability
Who does what
Licence drift is cross-functional, so the control has to be too.
Each stage needs a named owner in HR, management, IT, security and finance. Where one of them is missing, the estate quietly diverges from the operating model.
- HR confirms the position and start date
- The manager confirms the responsibilities
- IT provisions identity and access
- Security confirms the role is appropriate
- Licence assignment follows the work, not the job title
Remove cost, or unlock value?
Unused capability can mean two completely different things.
Either the organisation is paying for something it does not need, or it owns useful capability it has never adopted. Those lead to opposite decisions.
Where the programme is
Where recovery takes it
Paying for capability nobody needs
Remove or change the licence
Owning capability nobody adopted
Optimise and adopt it
Manual approvals despite owning automation
Use what is already paid for
Assumed over-licensing
Validated entitlement position
Four readings of the same evidence
Unused does not mean unnecessary.
Before a licence is removed, the reason it looks unused has to be established. Login frequency alone is not a decision.
Not required
Remove or change the entitlement, once the business owner agrees.
Valuable but not adopted
Optimise and adopt it. The value is unrealised, not absent.
The data is incomplete
Investigate before deciding. Absence of evidence is not evidence.
Occasional but critical
Retain it. Do not remove entitlement on login frequency alone.
Commercial optimisation should ask whether value is missing before assuming the cost is unnecessary.
Platform commercials
Each platform carries its own commercial behaviour.
We do not publish entitlement tables or price points here. Microsoft licensing changes, and any recommendation is validated against current official Microsoft documentation at the point it is made.
- User activity, role and application functionality
- Security assignments and resulting entitlements
- We do not publish detailed entitlement tables on this page
- Microsoft licensing rules change, so entitlement positions are validated against current official Microsoft documentation as part of a review
Finance & Supply Chain
In Finance & Supply Chain, licensing can stop the work.
Where per-user licence validation applies, an unassigned or incorrect licence is not a renewal conversation. It is an access conversation, and it surfaces at the worst possible moment.
- Assigned users and their assigned security roles
- Role, duty and privilege licence requirements
- Custom security roles and how they were built
- Inactive and dormant users
- Tenant-level licence consumption reporting
- Assigned versus required licence position
- Base and attach requirements, where current and applicable
Indirect access
Moving the interface does not automatically move the obligation.
Integrations, portals, bots and automated processes can still create a licensing requirement. Each scenario needs describing honestly and validating against current Microsoft Product Terms.
- Who is the ultimate user of the capability?
- What Dynamics capability or data are they using?
- Is the access direct or indirect?
- Does another application sit in between?
- Is information being read, created or updated?
- Is an integration writing transactions?
- Is a bot or agent acting on behalf of a person or a process?
- Is a device involved, and is the person a genuine external user?
- Does another Microsoft licensing construct apply to the scenario?
External users
External access is a licensing classification, not an HR label.
Somebody working on your behalf is often treated differently from a customer or partner acting for their own purpose. Product-specific rules decide, not job titles.
Internal user
An employee of the organisation.
Workforce-like user
A contractor, agent, vendor or other party performing work on the organisation's behalf. Frequently licensed like an internal user.
External customer or partner
Interacting with the organisation for their own purpose, not performing the organisation's work.
Shared device user
Works through an eligible shared-device scenario rather than a personal named account.
Automated process
A system, integration, bot or device acting without a human at the keyboard.
Beyond the licence
Licence cost is only one part of platform economics.
Support, customisation, manual work, duplication and technical debt often move more money than the entitlement line does.
- Microsoft licences and ISV licences
- Infrastructure or capacity, where relevant
- Support, development, integration and testing
- Reporting and administration
- Technical debt and manual work
- Operational failure, training and change
- The cheapest licence architecture can still create the most expensive operating model
System rationalisation
Licence optimisation sometimes begins with application architecture.
Microsoft first does not mean Microsoft only. Where a specialist WMS, TMS, PIM, clinical or industry system is genuinely better, it should be retained and integrated rather than replaced to reduce vendor count.
Keep
Still creates value in its current form.
Consolidate
Capability overlaps with something already owned.
Replace
No longer fit for how the business now operates.
Retire from operational use
The capability is no longer required, subject to data, contractual, integration, support and decommissioning requirements being satisfied first.
Integrate
Specialist capability remains genuinely justified.
Cost optimisation cannot create compliance risk. Cheaper is not optimised if the organisation is no longer correctly licensed.
Optimise
Optimisation is not simply removing licences.
A structured review reconnects role, access, entitlement, usage, cost and value, then puts governance in place so the estate does not drift again.
Inventory
What is assigned, to whom, and since when.
Understand
What those people actually do.
Map
Which capability the work requires.
Validate
What current Microsoft terms require.
Review
What is genuinely used.
Identify
Risk, waste and unrealised opportunity.
Recommend
Keep, change, remove or improve.
Govern
Prevent the estate drifting again.
- Finance, purchasing, warehouse and manufacturing
- Sales, service and projects
- Managers, executives and administrators
- For each: what work, which application, which role, which licence
Renewals
The useful licensing review happens before the commercial deadline.
Do not wait for renewal week. The position is easier to change when there is time to validate it.
- User population and planned role changes
- Platform roadmap and planned projects
- Actual usage
- New locations, entities or services
- AI plans
- Third-party and ISV renewals
- Review timing should follow the customer contract cycle, not an arbitrary calendar
Commercial baseline
You cannot prove improvement without a starting position.
A baseline is captured before change, so a later claim can be tested rather than asserted.
- Licences assigned, by type and population
- Actual customer licence cost, where the customer supplies it
- Contract, renewal and notice dates
- ISVs, capacities and application subscriptions
- Support cost and duplicate capability
- Manual operating cost, where it can be defended with evidence
- Commercial optimisation requires a baseline
Saving status
A saving exists when the cost leaves the contract.
Until then it is a proposal. We track each opportunity through the same five states so nobody confuses a spreadsheet with a commercial result.
Identified
An opportunity is visible in the evidence and worth testing.
Validated
Checked against current Microsoft sources and business need.
Approved
Accepted by the licence owner and the budget holder.
Implemented
The assignment, application or subscription change is made.
Realised
The change is visible in the agreement and the cost has actually left the contract.
Confidence gates
Four points where a licensing decision has to earn the right to proceed.
Each gate has a question, the evidence that answers it, and what happens when the answer is not yet good enough.
Gate 1
Evidence
Evidence confidence
Can a position be concluded at all from what is currently available?
Confirmed at this gate
- User population and assigned licences
- Access and security information
- Platform estate, environments and capacity
- Usage evidence where it exists
- Customer commercial data, where supplied
- Current official Microsoft sources for the products in scope
Decision
Proceed · Obtain further evidence · Cannot conclude yet
Gate 2
Entitlement
Entitlement confidence
Does the required entitlement follow from the work, the access and the current rules?
Confirmed at this gate
- Business responsibility and required capability
- Platform-specific licensing requirement
- Security role design and segregation of duties
- Indirect access scenarios
- External, workforce-like and device classification
- The current official source, and the date it was valid
Decision
Validated · Investigate further · Redesign required
Gate 3
Change
Change confidence
Before changing or removing entitlement, confirm the business can still operate.
Confirmed at this gate
- The business owner supports the change
- Occasional but critical use has been checked
- Access impact and adoption implications
- Integration and automation dependency
- Security and control impact
- Commercial effect and the right timing
Decision
Approve · Test first · Retain · Defer
Gate 4
Governance
Governance confidence
After the change, confirm the estate is correct and will stay correct.
Confirmed at this gate
- Assignment updated and user access tested
- Security position confirmed as correct
- Commercial action completed in the agreement
- Joiner, mover and leaver process updated
- Renewal plan updated
- Recommendation record stored, with the next review trigger defined
Decision
Close · Further action required · Periodic review
What you receive
A review should leave you with a defensible position, not a slide.
Everything below is dated, evidenced and owned, so it can be revisited at renewal or when the rules change.
- Licence inventory, with assigned and unassigned position
- User, role and business responsibility map
- Required entitlement analysis
- Security-role licensing exceptions
- Dormant and inactive user findings
- Application, ISV and capacity inventory
Shared responsibility
Licensing control only holds when both sides own their part.
InteliSense
Analysis, role and capability mapping, licensing interpretation using current sources, optimisation recommendations, security and licensing analysis, and scenario modelling.
Business or process owner
Confirms what the role genuinely requires, including the occasional but critical work that usage data does not show.
IT or application owner
Provides the actual tenant, environment and configuration evidence the analysis depends on.
Security or control owner
Confirms access appropriateness and the segregation-of-duties impact of any change.
Finance or procurement
Owns the customer contract, actual pricing, purchasing and the renewal decision.
HR
Provides role, joiner, mover and leaver evidence where it is appropriate to share it.
Customer
Owns the final licensing and commercial decision, and its agreement with Microsoft.
Illustrative scenarios
Patterns we assess, not findings we assume.
These examples are illustrative. They describe areas worth examining, not conclusions about any particular organisation.
Illustrative: inactive users still hold licences
Potential action: validate identity status against HR and usage data, then recover entitlement where it is genuinely redundant.
Illustrative: warehouse users hold broad licences
Potential action: assess whether role design, rather than genuine need, created the entitlement, then validate against current Microsoft terms.
Illustrative: automation owned, email approvals still used
Potential action: optimise before removing capability. The cost may not be unnecessary. The value may simply be unrealised.
Illustrative: multiple BI solutions duplicate reporting
Potential action: assess rationalisation across tools, ownership and data platform cost before adding more capacity.
Where licensing connects
Commercial questions rarely stay commercial for long.
Entitlement touches delivery, recovery, adoption, support and architecture. The right route depends on what the review finds.
Optimise
Licensing becomes more useful when reviewed alongside process, usage and platform design: inventory, usage, role mapping, security, licence mapping, application rationalisation and automation opportunity.
Transform
Commercial architecture should be considered before solution design is fixed. User counts, entitlement, environments, ISVs, reporting, AI and integration all follow design choices.
RAPID
A fixed delivery route should not hide variable licence requirements. Users, roles, environments, extensions and data capability are confirmed before acceleration.
Recovery
Users unable to access required capability, overly broad security roles, wrong licence assumptions or unbudgeted entitlement can all become implementation problems.
Support
Repeated access requests, role problems, unused accounts and duplicate capability are often the first signal that a licensing review is due.
Change & Adoption
A licensed user still working in a spreadsheet is an adoption question, not only a commercial one. Licensing data alone does not explain why.
Commercial discipline in practice
We publish verified customer evidence, not invented savings.
Where a customer has described platform simplification, application rationalisation, automation or long-term support in their own words, that is what we show. We do not publish licence savings figures we cannot evidence.
Evidence ladder
Where our licensing evidence honestly stands today.
We publish the level we have reached, and we say plainly what we have not yet published.
Level 1: review method
Published. This page describes the analysis and control approach in full.
Level 2: verified recommendation
Not yet published. A customer situation reviewed, with approved evidence behind it.
Level 3: implemented commercial change
Not yet published. A licence or application change completed and confirmed.
Level 4: verified realised outcome
Not yet published. A commercial saving or operating improvement verified from customer evidence.
Where should you start?
A short licensing self assessment.
Answer five questions and we will point you at the part of the review that fits your situation. Nothing is stored until you choose to send it.
Indicative signal
Answer the questions and we will show a likely starting point. This is a suggested next route rather than a licensing conclusion, and it never states a compliance position. Please keep every answer at organisational level: no user names, licence keys, contract documents or pricing.
Your answers are carried through, so you will not be asked to repeat them. Final qualification is always a conversation.
Common questions
Questions finance and IT leaders ask about licensing.
Commercial control
Do your licences reflect how the business works today?
If your Microsoft estate has grown through projects, new users, acquisitions, Power Platform, reporting or AI, a structured review can help identify where entitlement, usage, security and business need no longer align.