Microsoft announced some licensing changes for partners to bring them into the new commerce experience.

Now available: Seat-based offers in the new commerce experience – US Partner Community Blog – Microsoft 

The main changes for a CSP partner here are:

• Monthly/Annual/Tri-annual license terms
• License contracts will actually be enforced instead of being prorate refunded like they previously were
• CSP’s will get a discount cost price for having annual and tri-annual terms
• When in a term, you are not able to reduce license count

As far as Sync 365 License is concerned, all of our license automation to your PSA tool will continue to work and save you lots of time.

As far as licensing to a PSA tool is concerned. From the back end side, there is almost no changes in how the license flow works with quantity and prorating of license. The main difference being that you cannot reduce license count when a license is in a term.

Billing Thoughts

We have been asked by a few partners about the monthly or annual billing. We recommend to always focus on monthly billing, even if this is an annual or tri-annual commitment. The main reason for this is that if you have any license changes you can prorate and invoice for these changes in the next month’s invoice. If you are invoicing annually, these changes will only get picked up on the anniversary or the invoice.

Additional NCE Features

As part of what we have done to embrace these changes, you will notice the following changes available in Sync 365 License

Note: Access for NCE subscription information is only available to direct CSP partners with Microsoft. If you are an indirect partner (aka you purchase licenses via a distributor) there are no permissions to retrieve the subscription details from Microsoft.

Additionally, this information will only show if you use the “Bill by subscription ID” option.

Additional subscription information in the web interface and posted to your PSA Additions

For subscriptions that you provide, we are able to retrieve additional information about it.

This will show up as an additional column in Sync 365 License and display the Billing Cycle, Start date end date and term duration

For any subscription with this additional information, you have the option to add this to the license addition.

You can select to show either the Term or end date, or both.

This will append this information to the addition in your PSA tool so that it will get displayed on the invoice to the customer.

Phase 2 additions

Further to these NCE changes, we will also be rolling out an option to automatically apply Microsoft promotions to customers that are eligible.

This will work by selecting on a per customer basis if you would like MS Promo’s to apply.

For example, if Microsoft releases a promo for all Microsoft 365 Business Premium customers with less than 300 licenses to provide a 15% discount on it, this system will automatically add this discount to the additions for that customer if they are eligible.

As part of this there will also be an option to provide per customer discounts and specify custom discount amounts and which licenses this applies to.