It is a common story in small businesses: Microsoft 365 gets paid for every month and used for email and Word documents, and then separate tools are bought for jobs the existing licences already cover.
If you are on Business Basic, Standard or Premium, here is what you are probably already paying for.
File storage and sharing: OneDrive and SharePoint
Still emailing spreadsheets back and forth, or paying separately for Dropbox? Microsoft 365 business plans include 1TB of OneDrive storage per person, plus SharePoint for shared company files. Files stay in one place, everyone works on the current version and when a laptop dies the files don’t die with it.
Bookings, forms and calling
Three things businesses commonly pay for separately:
- Microsoft Bookings: a booking page where customers pick a slot in your calendar. It covers much of what people pay Calendly for.
- Microsoft Forms: surveys, feedback forms and quizzes, which covers a lot of what people pay SurveyMonkey or Typeform for.
- Teams: most businesses use it for the odd video call, but it can take a lot of internal email off people’s plates, and with the Teams Phone add-on it can become the business phone system.
Automation: Power Automate
That job where someone copies figures from an email into a spreadsheet every morning, or saves invoices to a folder, renames them and forwards them to the accountant, can often be automated with Power Automate. A standard version is included with Microsoft 365 business plans, and a single well-built automation can give someone back a noticeable part of their week.
Security you already own
This is the important part. Business plans include protections that are often never switched on or never set up properly:
- Two-step login (MFA): the most effective single protection against someone taking over an account with a stolen password. It costs nothing extra, and rolling it out properly is usually an afternoon’s work rather than a project.
- Conditional Access (Business Premium): block sign-ins from countries you don’t operate in, require devices to meet your standards and stop a stolen password being enough on its own.
- Intune (Business Premium): if a laptop or phone goes missing, you can wipe the company data on it remotely. Without something like it, a lost device can quickly become a data breach.
If you are paying for Business Premium and not using Intune and Conditional Access, you are paying for security you are not getting.
So what’s the catch?
The catch is setup. None of this works well straight out of the box. It works well when someone configures it deliberately, matches it to how your business actually operates and switches off the noise, which is usually a few days of work rather than a project that eats a quarter.
A good place to start is comparing what your current licences include with what you actually use. That comparison is part of our free 30-minute IT health check, and it often shows there is more to get out of what you already pay for before buying anything new.