The single easiest way to overspend on Business Central is to give everyone a full licence. Who actually needs Essentials, when you need Premium (and why it is all or nothing), what a Team Member can and cannot do, and the device licence that most warehouses should be using.
Business Central licensing is simple compared with most ERPs, and businesses still get it wrong in the same two ways: everyone gets a full licence because it is easier, and Premium gets bought because manufacturing "might be needed later". Here is who needs what.
| Licence | UK list price, per user per month | What it is for |
|---|---|---|
| Essentials | £61.50 | Full access to finance, sales, purchasing, stock, warehousing (basic and advanced), projects, fixed assets, CRM, HR basics, and all the setup. The licence for anyone who creates and posts transactions. |
| Premium | £84.60 | Everything in Essentials plus manufacturing (production orders, BOMs, routings, capacity, subcontracting) and service management (service orders, contracts, items). |
| Team Member | £6.20 | Read anything; create and edit a limited set of records (approve, update existing customers and items, enter timesheets and expenses, create quotes); post a few things like timesheets. Cannot create and post sales or purchase documents. |
The rule that catches people: all full users in a tenant must be the same edition. You cannot have ten Essentials users in finance and five Premium users on the shop floor. If anyone needs manufacturing, everyone pays Premium. For a 40-user business that is the difference between £29,500 and £40,600 a year, so the question "do we actually need manufacturing or service?" is worth £11,000 a year.
Finance (all of it), sales administration, purchasing, stock controllers, warehouse supervisors, project managers who bill, anyone who sets up or maintains master data, and the system administrator. In most businesses this is 30 to 50 per cent of the people who touch the system.
More people than you think. Managers who approve and read reports. Salespeople who look up customers, stock and prices and raise quotes. Engineers and consultants who enter timesheets and expenses. Anyone who needs to see an order status or a balance. Directors. The Team Member licence is deliberately generous on reading and deliberately mean on posting, which is exactly the shape most of a business needs.
The test: does this person need to create and post a sales or purchase document, a journal, or a stock movement? If not, Team Member. If they do it once a month, think about whether someone else should do it for them at £55 a month saved.
When you use production orders: you make things from components with routings and capacity, or you subcontract operations. Or when you run service management: field service orders, service contracts, serviced items. Not when you assemble kits (assembly orders are in Essentials). Not because "we might do manufacturing in two years": you can move from Essentials to Premium at any time, and the data and configuration carry across. Buy Premium when the first production order is about to be raised, not before.
A device licence is a full licence attached to a shared device (a warehouse scanner, a shop-floor terminal, a point-of-sale) rather than a person, with a restricted set of tasks: warehouse shipments and receipts, picks and put-aways, production output, point of sale. Three shifts of warehouse staff sharing four scanners need four device licences, not twelve Essentials licences. It is priced per device, on request rather than on the public list, and it is the licence that warehouse-heavy businesses most often do not know exists.
The licensing calculator on the home page lets you try the user mix and see the annual number, including storage and the Essentials-or-Premium check. If you would like us to look at your current licence list and tell you what it should be, that is a half-hour job and we are happy to do it: get in touch.
