For most of your customers, Microsoft 365 is the single biggest line item — and the easiest to overspend on. The waste is rarely dramatic. It’s a licence here, an over-specced plan there, a service account nobody remembers, all quietly adding up. The good news is that most of it is straightforward to find and reclaim, once you can see usage as well as entitlement.
Here are five moves that consistently show up on the next invoice.
1. Reclaim inactive licences
Any account that hasn’t signed in for 90 days is a candidate — leavers, disabled users and dormant mailboxes still holding a paid subscription. Find them, then disable or downgrade.
2. Right-size the SKU to the usage
Plenty of E5 users only ever touch E3 features. Match the licence to what each person actually uses: PC Office client versus web only, a Visio or Project entitlement with no recorded usage, Azure AD Premium with no SSO activity.
3. Clean up shared, service and admin accounts
Resource, service, admin and test accounts rarely need a full user subscription — and often have one. They’re easy wins, because no real user is affected.
4. Stop paying twice
A third-party tool that duplicates something Microsoft 365 already includes is pure waste. Consolidating to what’s already entitled is often the single biggest saving.
5. Keep the true-up honest
Track entitlement against deployment continuously, not once a year in a panic. Small drifts caught monthly never become a large bill.
Make it repeatable
The trick isn’t doing this once — it’s keeping it true. With usage flowing continuously through ‘M365 Optimize’, each of these becomes a standing report rather than a fire drill, and the savings compound every renewal. In practice that’s typically a 5–15% reduction, without losing any required services.
Want to see what it finds on your own tenants? Get in touch for a look.