Your Microsoft license statement is the record of what you are entitled to. It is one half of every audit. Knowing how to read it, and what to check it against, is how you find a discrepancy before it becomes an exposure.
The statement is your entitlement, not your position
A Microsoft license statement lists the licenses you have acquired across your agreements. It is the entitlement side of the equation. It is not your compliance position, because compliance is entitlement measured against actual deployment. An audit builds the Effective License Position, the reconciliation of deployment against entitlement, by taking your deployment from telemetry and tooling and comparing it to entitlement. Your statement is where that entitlement number should come from, which is why reading it accurately matters.
What to read on the statement
A statement repays close reading. The figures that decide exposure are not always the ones that draw the eye.
- Product and edition, because rights differ sharply between editions
- Quantity and the unit, whether the count is per user, per device, or per core
- Software Assurance status, which governs mobility, upgrade, and other rights
- Agreement and effective dates, which set what was covered and when
- Any true up history that adjusted the entitlement over the term
Reconcile against deployment
Reading the statement is step one. Step two is reconciling it against what is actually deployed, because that is what an audit does. Take the entitlement from the statement and set it against the real estate: the installed products, the core counts, the user and device counts, and the virtual instances. Where deployment exceeds entitlement, you have exposure. Where entitlement exceeds deployment, you may be overprovisioned and paying for licenses you do not use. Both findings are useful, and both are better found by you than by the auditor.
Statement against deployment
| Line on the statement | Check it against |
|---|---|
| Per core quantity | Real physical core counts on licensed hosts |
| Per user or device | Active user and device counts in the directory |
| Software Assurance status | Whether mobility and upgrade rights were live when used |
Where the discrepancies hide
The costly discrepancies are usually quiet. A lapsed Software Assurance that silently removed a mobility right. A true up that was never reconciled to real usage. An edition assumed to carry rights it does not. A count recorded per server when the product licenses per core. None of these announce themselves, because the software keeps running. They surface only when entitlement is measured against deployment, which is precisely the moment you want to be the one doing the measuring.
The next step
Your license statement is the foundation of any defense, but only once you have reconciled it against the real estate. Start with our pillar, the Effective License Position Guide, then read per core licensing and the audit and bring your own license rules. Reconcile the statement before Microsoft does, and you turn a record into a defense.
If this is live on your desk right now, we take over the process through our Microsoft audit defense engagement.
Reconcile your statement before Microsoft does
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