We regularly meet teams paying for a separate task-tracking tool, a separate file-approval tool, and a separate automation platform — all solving problems that Microsoft 365, which they already have licensed, already solves. Nobody made a bad purchasing decision. Nobody had ever been shown what was actually available inside the subscription they were already paying for, so a real business need showed up, someone searched for a tool, found one, and bought it — reasonably, given what they knew at the time.
Why this happens so often
Microsoft 365 gets sold and onboarded as "email and documents." The rest of the suite — Power Automate, Teams' approval workflows, Power BI, Power Apps for lightweight internal tools — gets license access on day one and zero attention afterward, because nobody's job is specifically to teach a team what's sitting unused inside a platform they already have. IT rolled it out. Nobody owns "helping people discover what's actually in it."
The result is entirely predictable, and it repeats across department after department: a real business need shows up, someone searches for a tool that solves it, finds one, and buys it — while an equivalent capability sits three clicks away in software the company is already paying for, unused because nobody knew to look.
Where we see this most often
- Approval workflows built as an email chain or a shared spreadsheet with a color-coding system, when Power Automate can route and track the same approval in an afternoon of setup — with a full audit trail nobody has to maintain by hand.
- Simple internal tools — an equipment request form, a basic tracker, a room-booking system — commissioned as custom software projects, when Power Apps could deliver something adequate in days, not months, at zero additional license cost.
- Reporting built manually every week in a spreadsheet that someone painstakingly reformats, when Power BI could refresh the same view automatically from the same underlying data, freeing up the hours that person spends reformatting rather than analyzing.
- Basic task coordination run through a paid project-management tool for a team that never uses more than a fraction of its features, when Planner or Teams tasks would cover the actual need at no incremental cost.
The pattern underneath all four
Notice what these have in common: none of them are exotic use cases. They're the ordinary, recurring administrative overhead of running a team — approvals, requests, reports, task lists — the kind of thing every department reinvents independently, usually with whatever tool the person doing it happened to already know, rather than whatever tool the company had already paid for.
That's the actual cost of the gap: it's not one bad purchase, it's dozens of small, independently reasonable ones, compounding across a company that's paying twice for the same category of capability — once for the license sitting unused, once for the replacement tool someone found instead.
The actual fix isn't more software
The fix almost never requires buying anything new. It requires someone showing the team what's already available, in the context of a real problem they're currently solving the hard way. That's a fundamentally different kind of training than a generic "Microsoft 365 overview" — it starts from "here's the manual process costing you three hours a week" and ends at "here's the same result on autopilot," built with the team's own real approval chain or reporting need, not a hypothetical demo.
Before your next tool purchase, it's worth asking a cheaper question first: does the platform we're already paying for already do this? More often than most finance teams would guess, the honest answer is yes — and the only missing piece was someone showing the team where to find it.
A cheap way to check, before the next purchase request
A useful habit for any team about to sign off on new software: before approving the purchase, spend twenty minutes with whoever owns the Microsoft 365 relationship and describe the actual problem in plain terms — not "we need a task tracker," but "we need to know when an equipment request has been approved by both a manager and finance." That framing, aimed at the specific workflow rather than a tool category, is usually enough for someone who actually knows the platform to say immediately whether it's already covered. It's a cheap conversation to have before a purchase, and a much more expensive one to have after a contract's already signed.