M365 for a 5-Person Firm: The Licence Stack You're Paying For

M365 for a 5-person firm: the licence stack you're paying for, and the bits you never switched on

Ask five small firms what their Microsoft 365 bill covers and you'll get five vague answers: "email and Word, I think". The licences are the easiest place for a five-person firm to be simultaneously overpaying and under-using: a bill that looks small every month, with features switched off, defaults left exactly as Microsoft shipped them. Here is what the stack actually contains as of 3 September 2026, using Microsoft's own UK list prices.

What you're paying: UK list prices, five seats

Prices below are Microsoft's UK list prices, per user per month, annual subscription, excluding VAT, taken from Microsoft 365 plans and pricing for business (accessed 3 September 2026).

Two things worth noticing. First, as of Microsoft's July 2026 packaging update, the Standard and Premium suites on the UK page ship with Copilot Business bundled, so you can no longer assume your "normal" Premium seats exclude AI; check what you actually signed up for. Second, the gap between Basic and Premium is £19.20 per user per month, or £96/month, £1,152/year across five seats, and that gap is not "more Office". It's device management, threat protection and data governance you may already be paying someone else to do badly.

No one's licence is wrong in the abstract. It's wrong for them. A firm paying Premium-with-Copilot rates for five people who only use Outlook and Excel is paying £1,152 a year more than the same firm on Basic. A firm on Basic whose laptops have no managed antivirus is saving £19.20 per user per month against a risk it hasn't priced.

The bits you never switched on

Every item below is included in what you already pay for, verified against Microsoft's own documentation this week.

• Self-service password reset. "Included with any Microsoft 365 business… paid plan" and "no extra charge to turn on" (Microsoft Learn: Let users reset their own passwords, accessed 3 September 2026). If your "IT person" is still getting password-reset pings at 8am, this one toggle ends that. The flip side, stated honestly: on-premises Active Directory setups need Entra ID P1/P2; it's cloud-only tenants that get it free.
• Microsoft Entra's "Revoke sessions" button. One click stops a user minting new tokens (Microsoft Learn: Revoke user access in Microsoft Entra ID, accessed 3 September 2026). Most small firms discover this feature the day they wish they'd known it a month earlier. See the offboarding checklist post.
• Device management, if you're on Premium. Intune, Defender and Purview are line items on your plan page, yet most 5-person Premium tenants have never opened the Intune portal. If nobody manages your laptops, you're paying for a manager that's idle, and your "good with computers" person is still absorbing the failures. The arithmetic on that arrangement is here.
• The apps behind the eleven you use. Bookings, Planner, Forms, Loop, Clipchamp are in the subscription. A firm that pays for the whole stack and runs on email attachments is renting a warehouse to store one box.
• External sharing, which is on. Microsoft's own docs: "External sharing is turned on by default for your entire SharePoint and OneDrive environment" (Overview of external sharing, accessed 3 September 2026). Switched on by default is different from switched on on purpose. That distinction is an audit.

What a sensible audit looks like

One hour, roughly: export the active-user/license report from the admin centre; compare seats against humans; check whether MFA and self-service reset are on; list who can share externally; and price the Basic↔Premium gap against what you actually use. If the audit finds three Premium seats doing a Basic job, that's £19.20 × 3 = £57.60 a month of shelf-ware, so the audit has paid for itself all year. And if it finds a laptop with no managed security, that's the more expensive finding, and the one worth doing something about first.

The upside is not exotic. It's that the stack you already bought starts doing the job you assumed it was doing.

Get the licences and the settings reviewed as one thing → apxdigital.io/it-support

Pricing is per-firm: we quote after the audit, we don't hand you a number first.

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APX Digital: remote-first M365 support for small firms. Birmingham / Coventry / West Midlands.

Info@apxdigital.io · 07753 226214