The most common licensing mistake we find is uniformity: everybody on the same plan because it was easier to buy that way. The gap between the cheapest and the most expensive tier is roughly four times the monthly cost per user, so uniformity is expensive.
Sort your people into four buckets
- Web and mobile only — shared terminals, field staff, warehouse. Basic is enough.
- Desktop apps but company email lives elsewhere — the Apps plan, no mail hosting.
- Standard office worker — desktop apps, email, Teams, SharePoint. Standard.
- Handles sensitive data or needs device management and advanced security — Premium.
Then check the list nobody checks: licences still assigned to people who left, duplicate licences on shared mailboxes, and add-ons that a plan upgrade already includes. In a twenty-person company that review typically finds two or three hundred dollars a month.
Because we're a Microsoft CSP partner, the licences, the migration and the support come from the same place — so nobody can tell you the problem belongs to a different vendor.