A major pain point and basic pain point with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance & Operations has always been understanding the licensing model and licensing needs. No, nothing wrong with you, everyone has been and still is confused. The result is maybe you are compliant, maybe not. So let's demystify this.

Until recently to figure out how many licenses you needed required a horrible effort. Here is what worked best for me. Get the user licenses counts at System administration > Inquiries > Licenses > User license counts report. You can what licenses Lars and Alicia have:

• Lars needs an Operations license because it has Production supervisor role.

• Brooke on the other hand needs an Operations because she has the roles of Tax accountant and Human resource assistant. But does she just need a Base license or a Base license and some Attach licenses?

If you exported this report to CSV or your preferred format, with a little automation you would have this in a useful table format that would make your life easier.

To answer what licenses Alicia needs we have to check in the user license estimator at System administration > Inquiries > License reports > User license estimator.

Using this report we can see that Lars needs a SCM license, and Brooke SCM + HR. All those who need a single license need a Base license for the respective application/module, and if you have exported the previous report and tweaked into a table you could add this info to the different accounts and use say Excel to do the bean counting.

Brooke however is using both SCM and HR so she needs a Base license to which an attach license can be added. The basic rule is that you would purchase a Base license for the application/module that she uses the most and Attach licenses for the others. 

Seems simple, but people change roles, new ones are hired, others leave or retire, and managing this this way, was no walk in the park. OK no problem, Microsoft was not enforcing licensing so you did your best and it worked.

However in the end of the 1st quarter of 2025 Microsoft started informing its customers that licensing would start to be enforced. Initially from the 30th of April users would start to receive a message if they did not the required licenses and enforcement would begin from the 30th of August 2025. After several iterations it's now the 30th of September 2025 and the 1st of November respectively.

The good news is that with Microsoft in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance & Operations 10.0.43 has released a lot a lot of new functionality for preview to help you with this. The bad news is not all of it made it to 10.0.44. But that will be the subject of the next article.