The license bill nobody reconciled since January
The scenario:
Every month the vendor invoice arrives. Every month it is slightly higher than last month. Every month it gets paid, because who has time to reconcile 40 line items across a dozen clients.
License counts only move one way when nobody is watching. Ex-employees keep seats. Trials become paid. A client who dropped from 60 staff to 45 still pays for 60, or worse, you do.
The waste hides in plain sight because each line item is small. Fifteen dollars here for a leaver’s mailbox, forty there for a client who shrank. Across a dozen clients and a year of invoices, MSPs routinely find four figures of annual margin in the first reconciliation, and the client-facing version of the same exercise wins renewals.
The prompt:
You are building a monthly license reconciliation process for an MSP.
Context: [your main vendors, number of clients, who currently touches licensing]
Build:
A per-client reconciliation sheet: licenses billed by vendor, licenses billed to client, active headcount, variance
The 30-minute monthly routine: pull counts, flag variances over threshold, one owner
The client-facing note for when reconciliation finds savings, because finding their overspend builds more trust than any QBR slide
The margin check: where we absorb cost the client should carry, and the correction plan
Automate the pulls where the vendor has an API. Flag which of my vendors do.