The license leak most organizations never audit.

Here is how it happens. Someone joins. IT buys them a license. A year later they leave. In the rush, nobody removes the account, or the license moves on to someone else, or a new plan is bought "to be safe." Do that thirty or forty times over a few years (which is normal, because good people leave) and you are paying every month for staff who are long gone.

For a 50 to 200-seat organization, this quietly adds up to somewhere around five to six thousand dollars a year. That is a program budget. That is a staff member. And almost nobody has ever looked, because it is nobody's job to look.

Why now

Two things make this the year to check. First, Microsoft is ending its free nonprofit licenses. Organizations that never paid much attention to license spend are about to feel it. Second, budgets are tighter everywhere. Money you already have is the cheapest money there is.

How to find it yourself

You do not need us to do this. Sign in to your Microsoft 365 admin center. Look at active users against paid licenses. Sort by last sign-in. Every account that has not signed in for months is a question. Every license assigned to someone who left is a leak. Write down what you find and take it to whoever holds the budget.

The first step is not buying anything. It is looking. Most organizations have never looked.

The reason most teams still do not do this is simple: the person who inherited the IT has forty other things on their plate, and no one ever told them this was their job. That is fair. It is a boring, invisible task, right up until it is five thousand dollars a year.

← All field notes