Use case · Renewal & true-up

Your renewal is coming. You'll live with that number for three years.

Chronom connects read-only in 15 minutes and comes back inside 48 hours with a seat-by-seat, SKU-by-SKU picture of what your tenant actually needs. You walk into the renewal with a baseline you can defend line by line - not last year's peak headcount.

Read-only Access No Credit Card SOC 2 Compliant
contoso · EA anniversary
T-60 days
Seats on the renewal quote 1,204
Seats your usage actually supports 1,046
Seats about to be committed with no evidence behind them 158
Locked in over a 36-month term
$0
reconciling entitlement vs usage…
212 downgrades 84 add-ons to drop 61 duplicate entitlements
12-month usage window read-only Graph API priced at your rates
Sound familiar

Renewal season is the one deadline that bills you for being busy.

Nobody gets to renewal with a clean tenant. The year happened - projects started, people left, someone standardised on a premium SKU to solve a problem that has since gone away. None of that is negligence. It's just a hundred reasonable decisions nobody had time to revisit, all landing on one quote.

The unfair part is the asymmetry: a seat you can't justify in the next few weeks doesn't cost you a few weeks. It becomes the baseline, and the baseline is what every uplift is applied to for the rest of the term.

36 mo
the term your baseline carries
0
ways to true a baseline back down mid-term
48 hrs
to a defensible seat count with Chronom
week 1

Two weeks to respond

The quote lands with an uplift on it and a date by which procurement needs your recommendation. Your last real licence review was a spreadsheet somebody built eighteen months ago.

the trap

You're being billed for last year's peak

You provisioned 80 seats for a programme that wrapped in March. The people are gone. The seats are still in the count - and peak count is what the true-up reconciles.

the part that stings

You know the slack is in there

You're fairly sure a few hundred seats are over-tiered. What you can't do is prove which ones, on which people, in time for it to change the number you sign.

Fast, easy discovery

From connection to a signed-off seat count in a week, not a quarter

Discovery is the part everyone dreads and the part we made trivial. There is no agent to deploy, no data collection project, and nothing for your team to prepare.

15 minutes 01

Connect read-only

Consent through the Microsoft Graph API, read-only. No agents, no scripts, no changes to your tenant. Your team is done after this step.

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

Get the real baseline

Every user, group, SKU, add-on and mailbox is evaluated against 12 months of feature-level usage. You get contracted vs. needed, per SKU, with the gap priced.

40+ waste patterns · named users
before you sign 03

Walk in with the evidence

A board-ready pack: what to renew, what to downgrade, what to drop, and the three-year cost of each. Optional managed execution means the changes actually land before the anniversary.

reseller- and vendor-agnostic
Start 90 days out if you can. It still works at T-30 - you just have fewer changes you can land before the count is taken.
No alerts. No open questions.

Your report reads like a decision list, because that's what you need this month

At renewal you don't have time to interpret findings. So Chronom doesn't produce findings - it produces the change, the affected people, the evidence behind it and the money, with nothing left open.

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

No Purview, eDiscovery, Entra P2 or Power BI activity in 12 months. Desktop Office apps, Teams and calling all stay exactly as they are.

$247K
recovered spend
E3 × 96 E1, no Teams Phone
warehouse & retail shifts
Why it's safe

Office desktop apps never activated on these accounts - browser and mobile sessions only. No calling minutes used in the last year.

$41K
recovered spend
Copilot × 84 Release before the anniversary
pilot cohort, 2024 rollout
Why it's safe

Zero recorded interactions in 90 days. Released now, these seats never enter the renewal count.

$30K
recovered spend
Power BI Pro × 61 Drop the add-on
users already on E5
Why it's safe

The capability is already inside E5. Same reports, same workspaces - the add-on was billing it a second time.

$8K
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 on a 36-month term. Your report carries your real numbers, tied to named users and SKUs.
Two operating modes

Decide how far to go - before you commit for three years

Renewal is exactly the moment to make this call deliberately, because it's the one you're stuck with. Chronom runs in one of two modes, and you choose 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 The mandate is a number. Finance has asked for a percentage off the renewal and you need every defensible dollar on the table before you negotiate.

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 You're mid-audit, in a regulated sector, or your security team owns the E5 decision. Savings stay inside the guardrails and no control gets traded for a discount.
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

You can cut the bill without sending a single email to the business

The reason most renewal savings never happen is political: nobody wants to be the person who took Visio away from finance three weeks before close. Chronom's recommendations are built so that never comes up.

  • 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

The renewal conversation stays between IT, finance and your reseller. As far as the rest of the company is concerned, nothing happened.

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

And then we keep watching, so the next true-up is a formality

A clean renewal that drifts for twelve months is just a smaller version of the same problem. Chronom keeps scanning after the signature.

continuous

True-up protection

Peak seat count is what gets reconciled, so peaks are what we watch. New assignments, contractor spikes and project provisioning are flagged as they happen - while you can still release them.

pre-purchase

No surprise purchases

Before anyone buys more seats, storage or add-ons, you can see whether the capacity already exists somewhere in the estate. Most of the time it does.

24/7

Drift caught in a day, not at close

Anomaly detection compares today's tenant against your approved baseline and flags what changed - inside a day, not in the month-end report.

always-on

Ready for the next negotiation

By the time the following anniversary comes round, the evidence pack is already current. There's no scramble, because there's no catching up to do.

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.

Read-only Access No Credit Card SOC 2 Compliant