Twenty-Eight Licences, Eleven Computers

We were looking at an office's Microsoft 365 account for an unrelated reason and noticed the seat count. Twenty-eight paid licences. Eleven computers.

That gap is not automatically a problem, and I want to be fair about that before going further. Plenty of people hold an account without holding a company laptop. Board members. Committee volunteers. A part-time bookkeeper who works from her own machine. Shared addresses like info@ or billing@ that nobody sits behind. An organisation with eleven desks can quite reasonably have twenty-eight mailboxes.

What is a problem is that nobody knew which of the twenty-eight were which. The number had never been looked at. It had only ever grown.

Nobody does anything wrong. It just accumulates.

Here is how an account drifts, and none of the steps involve carelessness.

Somebody joins. You buy them a licence, which is correct.

Somebody leaves. Their account gets switched off so they cannot sign in, which is the right thing to do and feels like the end of the task. But switching off an account is not the same as cancelling the licence attached to it. The account is dark and the licence is still on next month's bill. It will stay there until somebody goes and removes it, and there is no prompt, no warning, and no red number anywhere telling you it is happening.

Somebody changes jobs. The person who used to just check email is now running your accounting system, and their plan was never revisited.

Do that for four or five years and you end up where that office ended up. A number nobody chose.

The expensive version and the dangerous version

Paying too much is the obvious failure and it is the less serious one.

Microsoft sells several plans and the gap between the cheapest and the better ones is wide. The cheap plan is email and the web versions of Word and Excel. The better plan adds the installed desktop apps and, more to the point, the security features: control over who can sign in and from where, the ability to wipe a lost phone, protection against the fake-invoice emails that actually cost businesses money.

So there are two ways to be on the wrong plan.

Upward, where somebody who only ever reads email in a browser is sitting on the expensive plan. That costs you money every month and nothing else.

Downward, and this is the one worth caring about. Somebody handling your banking, your payroll or your client records is on the cheap plan, which means the protections you assume are switched on were never included. That does not show up on a bill. It shows up on the day somebody gets into their mailbox.

We see both in the same account regularly. They cancel out on the invoice and they do not cancel out anywhere that matters.

If you are a nonprofit, read this part twice

Microsoft still gives registered nonprofits up to 300 free Microsoft 365 Business Basic licences. That is a real offer and worth having.

But look at which plan that is. Business Basic is the cheap one. Email and the browser versions of Word and Excel. No installed desktop apps, and none of the security features described above.

The free Business Premium grant, which was the one that included those protections, ended on 1 July 2025. So did the free Office 365 E1 grant, if that is the one your organisation was on. Both stop at each organisation's next renewal after that date, which means that by now every annual renewal has been and gone. What replaced them is a discount of up to 75 percent, which is genuinely generous, and is not the same as free.

So if your organisation set its Microsoft account up years ago on the strength of the old grant, two things are worth checking today. Whether your free Premium licences have already lapsed at a renewal without anyone noticing. And whether the people handling your money and your records have quietly ended up on the free Basic plan, because that was the cheapest way to keep them working.

How to check your own, roughly, in ten minutes

You do not need anybody's help to get a first look at this.

Sign in to the Microsoft 365 admin centre and find the billing section that lists what you are paying for. Write down the number of each plan you hold.

Then look at the list of users and count how many accounts are actually people who work for you today. Not accounts that exist. People.

Compare the two numbers. If they match, good, and you have learned something worth knowing. If the licence count is meaningfully higher, the difference is either legitimate shared mailboxes and volunteers, or it is money going out every month for people who are gone. Both of those are answerable, but only if somebody asks.

Then ask one more thing. Of the people who do work for you, is anyone handling money or personal records on the cheapest plan? That question costs nothing and is worth more than the billing one.

Why this never surfaces on its own

Because everything is working. Email arrives, files open, nothing is broken, and the bill is a predictable number that gets paid without being read. There is no failure to investigate.

Microsoft will not tell you. They will happily keep billing what you asked to be billed, and they are not wrong to. It is your account.

So it comes down to whether anybody has looked, and when.

When did anyone last go through your Microsoft bill line by line and check it against the people who actually work for you?