The Enterprise Agreement true up is built to be simple to pay and easy to overpay. The traps are predictable, which means a prepared buyer can sidestep every one of them.
An Enterprise Agreement makes the annual true up feel routine. You report what you added, you pay, you move on. That routine is exactly where money leaks. The true up has a handful of recurring traps, and each one quietly pushes the number up. This article walks through the traps in the order they tend to bite, with the buyer side correction for each, so a procurement or IT asset team can defend the count before it becomes a payment.
A true up is a contractual reporting step, not a formal audit. There is no third party accounting firm, no Effective License Position produced by an auditor, and no 5 percent clause forcing licenses to 125 percent of price. That is good news: the room to get the count right is entirely yours. The catch is that the default count, the one assembled quickly from convenient data, almost always favors the vendor. The traps below are not tricks. They are the natural result of counting the easy way instead of the accurate way.
The most common trap is treating a temporary high water mark as a permanent position. A project that briefly doubled a team, a seasonal surge, or a short lived test environment can all push the assigned license count up for a few weeks. If the true up captures that peak instead of the steady state, you pay all year for capacity you used for a month. The correction is to count the true ongoing position from usage data across the year, not the highest point it ever reached.
Tier creep is the slow drift of users into higher editions than they consume. It happens when a standard provisioning template assigns the top tier by default, or when a one time need for an advanced capability leaves a user on E5 long after the need has passed. At true up time, every one of those users is counted and paid for at the higher tier. The correction is to right size each user to the capabilities they actually use, drawing on Microsoft 365 telemetry, before the count is finalized.
Licenses assigned to people who have left the organization keep counting until someone removes them. In a large estate with steady turnover, stale assignments can add a meaningful percentage to the true up. The correction is simple but easy to skip: reconcile the assigned list against current headcount and strip out accounts that no longer represent a real user before reporting.
An Enterprise Agreement comes with rights that reduce what you owe, and a fast count ignores them. Downgrade rights, secondary use rights, and entitlements you already hold can all offset part of the true up. If the count does not apply them, you pay for licenses you are already entitled to use. The correction is to apply every right and benefit you hold before agreeing any net figure.
When the same capability is licensed through both a suite and a standalone product, a careless count can charge the same user twice. This is most common where security and compliance add ons overlap with suite entitlements. The correction is to map each user to a single, correct entitlement and remove the duplicate.
| Trap | What it does | Correction |
|---|---|---|
| Peak counting | Pays for a temporary high point all year | Count the steady state from usage |
| Tier creep | Charges users at editions they do not use | Right size to actual capability |
| Leavers assigned | Counts accounts with no real user | Reconcile against headcount |
| Ignored rights | Skips offsets you already hold | Apply every right and benefit |
| Double counting | Charges the same user twice | Map to a single entitlement |
These categories are indicative, but together they explain most of the gap between a demanded true up and a verified one. It is rarely one large error and usually several smaller ones stacked together.
There is a second reason to take the true up seriously beyond this year's cost. A true up that runs far above your own understanding of your estate is a sign that Microsoft's view of your deployment differs from yours. That divergence is one of the patterns that draws audit attention. By correcting the true up with evidence, you do two things at once: you pay the right amount now, and you close the gap that could otherwise become a formal review later. A clean, evidenced true up is quiet, and quiet is what you want.
The defense against every trap above is the same discipline: count from your real deployment data, drawn from the sources Microsoft can see, then apply your rights and remove what is stale or duplicated. That produces a net position you can present with evidence rather than accept on trust. It also means that if the year ever does turn into an audit, the work is already done and the position already holds.
If your true up is approaching and the early number looks higher than it should, the time to act is before you submit, not after you pay. We rebuild the count, find every trap, and defend the position, all behind our guarantee that we reduce your exposure or we reimburse our service fee.
Book a Strategy Call and we will walk through where your Enterprise Agreement true up is most likely overstated and what it would take to correct it.
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