One of our solutions: paying for the ERP access people actually use. Business Central is the worked example, because Microsoft publishes its prices.
This page is about one specific thing: what Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central costs you, and how much of that is avoidable. It is one of our solutions rather than the whole practice — most of what we build has nothing to do with Microsoft licensing. But if you are on Business Central, this is usually the fastest money on the table.
The principle is not specific to Microsoft. Every per-user ERP sells access in tiers, and every business ends up buying more tier than most of its people use. We do this work on whatever you run. Business Central is the example we can put numbers against on a public web page, because Microsoft publishes its list prices; for SAP, Sage, Odoo or anything else, the same audit produces your figure privately.
Business Central is licensed per named user. Essentials is $80 per user per month, Premium is $110, and a Team Member licence is $8 — a tenth of the price. Most people in an ERP are doing Team Member work on an Essentials licence, because the full client is the only way in. That gap is where the saving lives.
Microsoft list prices, checked by us on 2 September 2026. Microsoft publishes no pricing feed, so we re-check them by hand and date them here. Microsoft's price page is the authority — if it disagrees with this one, it wins, and please tell us.
In the businesses we have looked at this usually sits between 50% and 70%. Drag it down if you want a conservative number.
Figures are annual, at Microsoft published US list price (verified 2 September 2026). Your reseller pricing, currency and agreement terms will differ — this is a sizing tool, not a quotation.
Have us check it properlyThere are two separate moves here, and both of them are ordinary licence hygiene rather than anything clever.
Microsoft's Team Member licence is not a read-only seat, which is the common misunderstanding. Team Member use rights cover reading anything in the system, approving or rejecting tasks in workflows, updating existing customer, vendor and item records, creating and editing quotes, and entering timesheets against jobs.
Think about who in your business does only those things. The manager approving or rejecting documents in a workflow from a phone. The sales assistant raising a quote. The buyer correcting an item or vendor record. The site engineer keying hours against a job. Anyone who spends the day looking things up. In most organisations that is well over half the named users — and they are almost always on a full Essentials licence, because opening the Business Central client is the only way they can get at their part of the job.
Give each of those people a screen that does exactly their task, and the correct licence follows naturally. $80 becomes $8.
Equally, some jobs that look small are not Team Member work. Raising a transfer order between warehouses, posting a warehouse receipt or shipment, turning a quote into an order, running an item reclassification — those sit outside Team Member use rights, and the person doing them keeps a full licence no matter how good the screen in front of them is. We tell you which of your users fall on which side before you change anything, because getting that wrong is what turns a saving into an audit finding.
The second half of the bill is usually the add-ons. Approval routing, document capture, a dashboard pack, a light warehouse or portal app — each billed again per user, every month, indefinitely. Once you have a front end of your own, that behaviour is built once and it stops being a subscription. If you pay $12 per user per month across 40 users, that alone is $5,760 a year.
We do not hide users behind the application. Microsoft's multiplexing rules are explicit: if a person's actions reach Business Central through an intermediary application, that person still needs a licence. Any consultant who tells you a web front end lets you drop to two named users and share them is describing a licence audit finding, not a saving.
What we do is legitimate and boring: we match the licence to the work, and we remove subscriptions you stop needing. That is why the number holds up when your Microsoft partner looks at it.
A front end is a one-off build; the licence saving is annual and recurring. In the deployments we have worked on, the first year's saving has covered the build, and everything after that is retained. We will not quote a figure on a web page — it depends entirely on how many roles you need and how awkward your data is. We will quote a fixed price once we have seen it.
Send us your user list and your add-on subscriptions. You get a one-page before-and-after, and it costs nothing.
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