Most buyers treat the annual Enterprise Agreement true up as a date on the calendar. A report is run, a quantity is reported, an invoice arrives, and the cycle repeats. What that view misses is that the true up is not a single moment. It is the end of a year you have been shaping all along, whether or not you meant to. The deployments you leave running, the licenses you let lapse, the purchases you defer, and the records you keep all decide what the true up will say long before the deadline arrives. This article explains how to use that lead time deliberately, so timing works for you rather than against you.
For the full picture of how Microsoft verifies and bills licensing across audits and agreements, the Microsoft Audit Survival Guide sets out the landscape. Here we focus on the calendar and the sequence of moves around the true up itself.
Why the calendar matters
A true up prices the net additional quantity of each licensed product since the last count. That quantity is a snapshot of your estate as it stands when you measure it. The key word is when. A server that ran a project for three months and was decommissioned in month four does not need to be in the count if you measure after it is gone and you can show it is gone. A user who left mid year should not be carried as an addition if your records are clean by the time you report. The estate is always moving, and the figure you submit depends entirely on the state of the estate at the moment you freeze it.
A true up measures your estate at a single moment. The work is making sure that moment shows what you genuinely run, not what you once ran.
This is why a true up run on autopilot almost always overstates. The default report counts everything tooling can still see, including the residue of a year of activity. Treating the deadline as the only date means you measure a messy estate and pay for the mess. Treating the months before the deadline as preparation time means you measure a clean estate and pay for what you use.
The preparation window
Give yourself a real window before the true up date, ideally a full quarter. That window is where the value is created. The work splits into a few clear tasks, none of which is aggressive and all of which simply make the count truthful.
- Decommission and confirm removal of project and test systems that are no longer needed, and keep the evidence that they are gone
- Reconcile user counts against current HR records so departed staff are not carried as additions
- Gather proof of entitlements you already hold, including prior purchases, downgrade and prior version rights, and anything acquired through a transaction
- Map each product and edition to what is actually deployed rather than the higher cost default the report assumes
- Reconcile your draft figure against the telemetry Microsoft already holds, so the submission does not create a mismatch
Each of these is far easier to do in calm preparation time than in the days before a deadline. Done early, they shrink the reported quantity to the genuine net addition. Done late or not at all, they leave the default number in place and you pay for systems and users that are not really there.
When to add, and when to wait
Timing also governs the things you choose to buy. If you know you will need a block of new licenses, the question of whether to acquire them before or after the true up is a commercial decision, not an accident. Buying ahead of a true up folds the addition into the annual count at the agreement terms. Waiting can change the price, the co terms, and the renewal baseline. There is no single right answer, because it depends on your renewal date, your negotiating position, and whether a larger commitment earns better terms. The point is to make the call deliberately rather than letting the calendar make it for you.
The same logic applies to reductions. Some changes you make late in the year will not be reflected until the following cycle, so a system retired just after the measurement date still counts this year. Knowing where the measurement date falls lets you sequence retirements so they land on the right side of it.
A worked illustration
Consider an organization approaching its true up with a default report showing 520 additional units. The figures here are indicative and used only to show how timing changes the outcome.
| Timing | Reported units | What drove it |
|---|---|---|
| Measure on the deadline, no prep | 520 | Everything tooling still counted |
| Retire test systems first, then measure | 430 | 90 systems removed and evidenced |
| Reconcile users before measuring | 390 | 40 leavers cleared from the count |
| Net held entitlements, then submit | 320 | 70 already covered by held rights |
The same estate yields a true up of 320 units rather than 520 simply because the count was taken after the preparation rather than before it. Nothing here is a trick. It is the difference between measuring a clean estate and measuring a messy one, and the only variable that changed was the order in which the work happened.
How a buyer side defense sequences the year
Defending a true up on timing follows a simple sequence, run early enough that each step has room to breathe.
Where this leaves you
The true up deadline is fixed, but the figure it produces is not. It is shaped by the months before it, by what you retire, what you reconcile, what you buy, and when. Buyers who wait for the deadline measure a year of residue and pay for it. Buyers who use the lead time deliberately measure what they actually run and report a number they can defend. Timing is the one lever on the true up that costs nothing to pull and changes the invoice every year.
To see how the true up fits inside the wider audit landscape and how to plan the year around it, download the Microsoft Audit Survival Guide and use it to build your own preparation calendar before the next deadline.
If an auditor is already asking questions, our EA true up defense team verifies the numbers before they become contractual.