M365Clarity · Waste
Licence waste in Microsoft 365 takes several forms: licences purchased but never assigned to any user, licences assigned to users who have since left the organisation, licences assigned to users who haven't signed in for 90+ days, and premium licences assigned to users who only use basic features.
M365Clarity's Waste tab focuses specifically on the first three — unused, unassigned, and assigned-but-inactive licences. Together these represent the most straightforward savings opportunities.
The Waste tab cross-references your licence inventory against sign-in activity and account status. It identifies specific users with licences but no recent activity, calculates the monthly cost of those idle licences based on your plan pricing, and gives you a prioritised list of accounts to review.
Example: A 100-user tenant with 8 licensed but inactive accounts on Business Premium (£19.40/user/month) is spending £155.20/month — £1,860/year — on access nobody is using.
Before removing licences from inactive accounts, verify the account status. Former employees should have their accounts blocked and licences removed as part of the offboarding process. For accounts with no sign-in but unclear status, check with the account owner or their manager before taking action. Service accounts may have infrequent but legitimate sign-in patterns.
Licence waste accumulates over time because offboarding isn't always clean. The best prevention is a formal offboarding checklist that includes a Microsoft 365 licence removal step, combined with automated stale account detection. M365Clarity's Stale Accounts check flags inactive licensed users on an ongoing basis so waste doesn't silently build up between audits.
M365Clarity scans your Microsoft 365 configuration and shows you exactly what's in your plan, what's configured, and what's sitting idle — in plain English.
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