Five Microsoft 365 licence wins worth checking this afternoon

If you run Microsoft 365 for a North Wales business, there’s a good chance you’re paying for licences that aren’t doing anything useful. Someone left the firm. A role changed. A mailbox got converted. The licence count, somehow, never went down.

The good news is that spotting this waste takes a lot less time than you’d expect. A quick sweep through the admin centre usually turns up several hundred pounds in annual savings, sometimes a few thousand, without cutting a single feature anyone actually uses.

Here are five things worth checking today.

1. Inactive users (the 90-day test)

In the Microsoft 365 Admin Centre, go to Reports, then Usage, then Active Users. Set the filter to 90 days. Anyone who hasn’t touched Exchange, Teams, SharePoint or OneDrive in that window is worth a second look. Don’t pull the licence immediately, some people legitimately go quiet for a quarter. But flag the account and ask the question: does this person still need a full seat?

2. Unassigned licences (pure waste)

Billing, then Licences. If you’re paying for a seat that isn’t assigned to anyone, you’re sending money out every month for nothing. This one is surprisingly common and genuinely easy to fix.

3. Wrong tier (where the bigger savings hide)

Receptionists, warehouse staff, temporary workers and part-timers sitting on full Business Premium or E3 licences when they only need email and Teams. Downgrading ten users from E3 (around £28 per seat per month in the UK) to F1 (around £2.70) saves roughly £3,000 a year. Have a look at who actually uses advanced features like Power BI, eDiscovery or Copilot. Everyone else can probably drop a tier without noticing.

4. Shared mailboxes under 50GB

A shared mailbox for a project or team inbox that isn’t sitting on 50GB or more of archived data doesn’t need a paid licence assigned. Yet they regularly have one. Easy to spot, easy to fix.

5. Old guest accounts (a security bonus)

In Entra ID (formerly Azure Active Directory), filter users by Guest. You’ll usually find old contractors, former suppliers, or people from a project that wrapped up two years ago. Cleaning them up helps on cost and on security, fewer dormant accounts means less to worry about if something goes wrong.

This isn’t a week-long project. You can start turning up waste in under ten minutes, and for many businesses across Denbighshire, Flintshire and the rest of the region, a half-hour licence review pays for itself several times over in the first year alone.

Licence waste rarely announces itself. It’s five users on the wrong tier, three inactive accounts, a couple of unassigned seats. They don’t scream. They just quietly appear on the renewal bill every year and add up to real money.

If the licence count has crept up and nobody’s quite sure what you’re actually paying for, Dragon Digital handles Microsoft 365 licence audits for businesses across North Wales and will give you a straight answer on where the easy savings are.