LicensingAugust 2024 · 4 min read
Finding wasted Microsoft 365 licenses
Unused seats, stale accounts and bundle overlap quietly inflate your Microsoft bill. Here's what to look for and how to report on it.
By AssetPilot Team
Microsoft 365 licensing is easy to over-buy and hard to right-size. Seats get assigned during onboarding and rarely reclaimed; premium SKUs stay attached to accounts that no longer need them; and standalone products quietly overlap with entitlements already inside a bundle.
Where does license waste hide?
- Unassigned seats, SKUs you're paying for with consumed units below purchased units. These are the fastest saving: reduce the subscription count or reallocate.
- Stale accounts still holding premium licenses, a disabled or long-dormant user carrying an E5 is pure waste. Cross-referencing license assignment against directory activity flags these quickly.
- Bundle overlap, a user holding a standalone SKU (say, a standalone Teams or Exchange plan) that's already included in a Microsoft 365 bundle they also hold.
How do you turn this into action?
Mapping SKU GUIDs to their friendly names and knowing which products live inside which bundle is what makes bundle overlap visible in the first place. AssetPilot's license reports group all of this by department, so you can hand a finance owner a costed list of exactly what to reclaim, rather than a raw export of GUIDs.