Financial Cliff Worksheet
What your Microsoft agreement costs on its current path
A worksheet your team fills in to compare the cost of continuing as is against the alternatives, before anybody from Microsoft asks you for more.
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Three things are pushing the number up at once
None of them are negotiable in the abstract. All of them are negotiable against a position, and a position starts with knowing what the current path actually costs.
A bigger suite
The expectation that you move up a tier arrives well before the renewal does, usually with a value story attached and rarely with a forecast you can check.
Consumption meters
Azure and capacity based services bill on use, which a fixed budget cannot absorb. The exposure shows up mid year, not at signature.
AI pricing
Copilot costs are moving from user counts toward the amount and type of work performed. Nobody can forecast that reliably yet, which is exactly why it belongs in the model rather than in a footnote.
Where recoverable cost usually sits
In an enterprise agreement, the money is rarely in the headline discount. The worksheet is structured around the four places it tends to be instead.
Entitlement architecture that does not match actual use
Suite levels assigned uniformly across business units whose work is not uniform. Mixing levels inside one tenant carries its own compliance exposure, so the fix is a design question rather than a spreadsheet question.
Security and compliance boundaries scoped wider than they need to be
Regulatory and data-protection requirements apply to specific data and specific users. When the boundary is drawn around the whole organization instead, the cost of the exception becomes the cost of the default.
Chargeback that does not reflect consumption
If business units are billed on headcount while consuming on use, nobody inside the organization has a reason to moderate demand, and central IT absorbs the variance.
Legacy rates and terms nobody reset
Terms negotiated for an earlier agreement, carried forward through renewals because no one went back to them. This is the quietest of the four and often the largest.
What the worksheet is, and what it is not
What it is
- A spreadsheet your team fills in, using figures you already have
- A side by side comparison of the current path against the alternatives you could ask for
- A structure you can take to a CFO or finance leader without translating it first
- Yours to keep, with no follow up required
What it is not
- An assessment tool that sends your data anywhere
- A quote, a proposal, or a scoped engagement
- A benchmark against organizations we cannot name
- A substitute for reading your own agreement, which the worksheet will make you do
Why this comes from us
We are an independent advisory firm working on Microsoft and nothing else since 1992. We have never sold a Microsoft license, we take no margin on your spend, and we carry no quota tied to your renewal. Nothing in this worksheet gets better for us if the number goes up.
Completely changed the way I looked at negotiating. I put too much trust in our reseller.Dana C. Senior IT Asset Manager. Selected from published attendee feedback.
After the worksheet
Two directions, depending on where your agreement sits.
Your renewal is more than 18 months out
Build the capability in house. The Microsoft Licensing & Negotiation Boot Camp runs three days in Orlando, March 9 to 11, 2027, or in five shorter virtual days. Two or more from your organization are $2,795 each.
See the trainingYour renewal is inside 18 months
The decisions that create leverage get made around nine months out, not at signature. Thirty minutes on where your agreement sits, at no cost and with no data required to start.
Book the callOne call to begin
Your situation, how we can help, and where to start. No cost, no obligation, and no data required.
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