Use case · Hidden waste discovery

Everything looks fine. That's exactly the problem.

Nobody is asleep at the wheel - the waste just doesn't look like waste. Chronom reads feature-level usage, not sign-ins, across every licence, add-on, mailbox and site, and comes back in 48 hours with what's actually being paid for twice, over-tiered, or not used at all.

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contoso.onmicrosoft.com
no issues reported
What your admin center reports
1,204
licensed
1,198
signed in / 30d
6
unassigned
What it can't see
E5 used like E3
212 seats · no Purview, P2 or Power BI activity in 12 months
$147,600
Idle Copilot
84 seats · zero interactions in 90 days
$30,240
Desktop apps never activated
96 seats on E3 · browser-only sessions all year
$18,600
Duplicate entitlements
61 add-ons billing a capability the base SKU already covers
$8,400
Licensed but disabled
38 accounts · blocked sign-in, SKU still assigned
$9,960
Reclaimable / year
$0
1,204 seats analysed · 40+ patterns
0 alerts
5 decisions
Sound familiar

This isn't a mistake anyone made. It's the sum of decisions nobody revisited.

The admin center tells you who signed in. It does not tell you who used what you're paying for. A user who opens webmail twice a week and nothing else shows up exactly like a power user - so an over-tiered seat looks identical to a justified one, forever.

And the honest reason it stays hidden isn't tooling. It's that checking properly means cross-referencing entitlements against feature usage for every person in the company, and no one has a spare month. So the number gets discovered at renewal, when it's already billed.

~32%
of average tenant spend is quietly wasted
40+
waste patterns checked per tenant
48 hrs
to know whether it's there
you already looked

The report said everyone was active

You pulled the licence report. Almost everyone signed in this month, six seats unassigned, nothing obviously wrong. So you closed the tab - because the report answered a question nobody was asking.

how it got there

A standard nobody chose on purpose

E5 got adopted in 2021 for a security programme that covered forty people. It became the default for new starters. Nobody decided that. It just never got revisited.

the pilot that never ended

Ninety days became two years

You bought a block of Copilot seats to evaluate it. Some people love it. Most opened it twice in April. The invoice never noticed the difference.

Fast, easy discovery

Two days to find out whether there's anything to find

Discovery shouldn't be a project you have to justify. Connecting takes a quarter of an hour, and if your tenant turns out to be genuinely lean, you'll have that in writing.

15 minutes 01

Connect read-only

Graph API consent, read-only. No agents, no scripts, no scheduled exports, nothing installed on an endpoint. That's the whole setup.

SOC 2 Type II · nothing is written back
48 hours 02

Get the whole picture at once

Every user, group, SKU, add-on, mailbox and site is evaluated against a year of real feature usage - not sign-in logs - and priced against your actual rates.

40+ patterns · named users
same week 03

Decide, then let us do it

Approve the changes you agree with. Chronom's team can execute them for you, so the finding turns into a lower invoice rather than a backlog ticket.

optional managed cleanup
If we find nothing meaningful, you get a clean bill of health you can put in front of finance - which is worth having too.
No alerts. No open questions.

No dashboards to interpret. No alerts to triage. No open questions.

Most tools hand you a signal and leave the thinking to you. Chronom only outputs conclusions: which licence, on which person, changes to what, and how much that's worth.

E5 × 212 E3 + Defender P1
sales, ops, field engineering
Why it's safe

Twelve months with no Purview, eDiscovery, Entra P2 or Power BI usage. Desktop Office, Teams and calling all continue untouched.

$147K
recovered spend
E5 × 34 E1, no Teams
seasonal & kiosk accounts
Why it's safe

Web-only Outlook sessions, no desktop activation, no Teams presence, no meetings joined in a year.

$22K
recovered spend
Copilot × 84 Release
2024 pilot cohort
Why it's safe

No recorded interactions in 90 days. The 36 people who do use it daily keep their seats.

$30K
recovered spend
E3 × 38 Release
disabled accounts
Why it's safe

Sign-in blocked at offboarding, licence never reclaimed. Mail and OneDrive content is preserved first.

$10K
recovered spend

What you won't be handed

Every line in a Chronom report is a decision with an owner, a SKU and a dollar figure. Nothing is left for you to go and find out.

  • “Low Teams usage detected” - a fact you now have to interpret

  • An alert queue that grows faster than you can triage it

  • A dashboard that hands the analysis back to you

Illustrative figures for a 1,200-seat tenant. Your report carries your real numbers, tied to named users and SKUs.
Two operating modes

Find the ceiling, then choose how close to it you want to get

Discovery gives you the full number. What you do with it is a policy decision, so Chronom runs in one of two modes and you set which.

Savings-oriented

maximize reclaim

Pull the number as low as the usage evidence allows. Chronom ranks every opportunity by dollar value and shows you the full ceiling before anything is decided.

  • Every downgrade the usage data supports is put on the table

  • Add-ons and overlapping SKUs are consolidated to the cheapest entitlement that still covers real usage

  • Premium tiers are recommended only for the people whose telemetry actually justifies them

Pick this when You want to know the real ceiling first - the biggest defensible number - and you'll decide what to exclude once you can see it priced.

Security-oriented

guardrails first

Keep every security and compliance control exactly where it is, and optimize within those boundaries. Savings are smaller - and nobody has to defend a weakened posture.

  • Your security baseline is a hard boundary: Defender, Entra P1/P2, Purview, DLP and retention stay where policy requires

  • Compliance-scoped users, admins and privileged accounts are excluded from downgrade entirely

  • Savings come only from seats and add-ons that sit outside the guardrails

Pick this when Your premium licensing exists because security or compliance asked for it. Chronom treats that baseline as untouchable and finds savings around it.
You set the mode - per tenant, per department, per group. Chronom operates inside the boundaries you define and never proposes anything outside them.
Nobody changes how they work

Nothing on anyone's desk changes

The fear behind every licence review is that it turns into a tax on the business - forms to fill in, tools taken away, someone's workflow broken on a Monday morning. That's not how this works.

  • No “please justify your licence” email to the business

  • No survey, no self-service reclaim portal, no chasing managers for sign-off

  • No app someone opens on Monday to find missing

Chronom's job is to make the entitlement match the usage. The usage is the thing we don't touch.

what the user sees unchanged
  • Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint - desktop, not web-only
  • Teams, including meetings, calling and the phone number they already use
  • Power BI reports, dashboards and workspaces they own
  • Visio, Project and the niche tools a handful of people genuinely need
  • OneDrive and SharePoint content, permissions and sync
what finance sees repriced
E5 + Power BI Pro add-on E5

Power BI Pro is already inside E5 - the add-on was billing the same capability twice. The reports keep working. The only thing that moved was the line item.

Continuous, not one-and-done

Waste rebuilds quietly. So the scanning doesn't stop.

A one-off clean-up decays. New starters get the default SKU, projects provision add-ons, someone re-enables an account. Chronom keeps looking so it never compounds again.

24/7

New drift, flagged in a day

Every scan compares your tenant against the baseline you approved. A new premium seat, a re-added add-on or a re-licensed leaver surfaces within a day - not in a quarterly review.

pre-purchase

Buy nothing you already own

When a team asks for more seats, storage or add-ons, you can check whether the entitlement already exists in the estate before the PO goes out.

renewal-safe

Fewer true-up surprises

Because peak seat count is what gets reconciled, catching a spike in week one instead of month twelve is what keeps the next true-up small.

always-on

The savings stay saved

Findings don't just reappear next year. Guardrails and continuous checks keep the estate at the shape you signed off on.

Other use cases

Most teams arrive here for one reason and stay for the others.

One Audit. Real Savings.
Zero Risk.

Get a comprehensive audit of your environment and see exactly how much you can save in under 15 minutes.

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