Manage your tenant subscriptions in Microsoft 365

  • 3 minutes

Maintaining minimum subscription requirements is essential for an organization to remaining functional. Purchasing an insufficient number of licenses can result in implementation delays, while purchasing an excessive number of licenses can result in overspending.

The following screenshot is an example from a tenant with group-based licensing, where all available licenses were already assigned. In this case, provisioning errors occurred because of depleted licenses.

screenshot from a tenant with group-based licensing, where all available licenses have already been assigned and a provisioning error is shown because of depleted licenses

All active and deprovisioned licenses can be reviewed from the Microsoft 365 admin center. In the left-hand navigation pane, select the Billing group and then the Licenses page. On the Licenses page, select the Subscriptions tab.

This page enables licenses to be assigned to user accounts and removed from user accounts. Extra licenses can also be purchased from here.

Note

Purchasing extra licenses changes the monthly billing date for those specific licenses. For example, if the main subscription was purchased on May 14 and there was another purchase that was completed on May 15, then the next billing cycle would show subscriptions with due dates of June 15 and 16, respectively.

All the information about an organization's existing subscriptions, including billing and payment information, is available within the Billing group in the Microsoft 365 admin center. This group includes the following pages:

  • Purchase services. This page enables an organization to do comparison shopping on up to three products at a time, and then start any purchases it wants to make.
  • Your products. This page displays all the subscriptions purchased by an organization. Those plans can also be maintained from here.
  • Licenses. This page provides a summary of the subscriptions purchased by your organization, including all the available licenses for each subscription.
  • Bills and payments. This page provides a history of all invoices charged to your organization, along with payment methods and billing profiles.
  • Billing notifications. This page identifies who will receive billing notifications within an organization and how each billing statement will be received.
  • Payment methods. This page enables an organization to define payment methods that it can use to pay for subscriptions.