How many companies pay for unused M365 licences?

M365 licences are easy to assign in practice but hard to revoke. A new employee starts, receives a bundle; a month later they need Visio or Power BI Pro, so another licence is added on top. When someone leaves, the licence often remains, because no one released it, because it was forgotten, or because no one wanted to risk breaking something. After a few years of this, the company pays for dozens of unused accounts and add-on licences. For a managing director or office manager compiling the IT budget, checking licences is usually the first place where real savings can be made without any operational risk.

Where it hurts most

The most common losses are not expensive deviations but recurring minor issues: accounts of former employees with full licenses, duplicate add-on licenses (Visio, Project, Power BI Pro) assigned to users who never opened them, and full licenses on shared mailboxes that do not need them at all. Individually, this looks like a few hundred Kč per month. Across dozens of accounts over a few years, it amounts to a sum that could easily cover a proper security consultation. And since these minor issues never resolve themselves, without regular checks they only continue to pile up.

How to find unused licences

The quickest route is the active users report in the M365 admin centre. It shows the last sign-in date for mail, OneDrive and Teams separately. The Entra ID sign-in overview adds detail on where and when each user last signed in. Procedure in brief:

• Generate a report of the last login for all licensed accounts.
• Compare the list of licenses with the current employee list from HR: the difference is often surprisingly large.
• For accounts that have not been logged into for a long time, verify whether this is due to departure, prolonged absence, or genuinely unused access.
• Check supplementary licences (Visio, Project, Power BI Pro) against who actually opened them.

Shared mailboxes that cost nothing

A shared mailbox (such as info@ or obchod@) up to 50 GB does not require a paid licence. It is sufficient to set it up as a shared mailbox rather than as a standard user account. In practice, however, the opposite is often seen: a shared mailbox created as a full user with a full licence, because that was the quickest option at the time of creation under pressure. Checking shared mailboxes against their licence type is one of the quicker savings identified immediately during the first audit.

When does a downgrade make sense?

Not every user requires the highest-tier package. If a company has third-party security tools that cover the same functionality as the expensive features in E5, it makes sense to switch to E3 and redirect the price difference elsewhere. Operational or shift workers who work primarily from mobile devices and do not need the full desktop Office suite often find the cheaper frontline licence sufficient. And companies on Business plans should regularly check whether all users truly require Business Premium, or if Standard without advanced security - which they handle differently - is enough for them.

Automated assignment

Manually assigning licenses one user at a time is the main reason licensing gets messy: it's quick for a single person, but no one oversees the whole picture. Group-based licensing solves this: the license is tied to group membership rather than a specific user, and when the group syncs with an HR system or Active Directory, licenses are assigned and removed automatically based on who belongs to the group. Setting this up takes time once, but saves it continuously thereafter, and most importantly, it prevents anyone from being overlooked.

How to maintain it long-term

A one-off license cleanup lasts only until the company grows again or replaces a few staff members. A more sustainable approach is to introduce regular, for example quarterly, checks of recent logins and license types, link license allocation to groups instead of manually clicking for each user individually, and above all include license release as a fixed part of the process. process when an employee leavesWithout this, cleaning will have to start all over again in a year or two.

Want to know how much you're actually paying for unused licences? We'll carry out a quick audit and show you the figures straight up.