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Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations Licensing: What You Need to Know Before 2026 Enforcement
Discover how being EDI capable in 2025 optimizes efficiency, compliance, and prepare your business for digital transformation.
#DrivingExpertLedTransformation
Neha Bhagat
Senior Director – Microsoft Dynamics (Practice Head)
December 4, 2025
Table of Content
Microsoft is changing how Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations (F&O) licenses are tracked and enforced. For years, many organizations have relied on a mix of trust, manual clean-up, and the occasional audit. Now, enforcement is moving into the product itself.
This blog explains what’s changing, key dates to know, and how to prepare so you stay compliant without paying for more licenses than you need.
What’s Changing – in Plain Language
The new rules apply to the finance and operations apps:
- Dynamics 365 Finance & Finance Premium
- Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management & SCM Premium
- Dynamics 365 Commerce
- Dynamics 365 Project Operations
- Dynamics 365 Human Resources
The core shift is simple:
- Every user must have the right license based on what they actually do.
- That license must be assigned through the Microsoft 365 admin center.
- The system will eventually block users who don’t meet those rules.
Until now, it was possible for users to have access that didn’t perfectly match their license. Going forward, that gap will be much harder to ignore.
Key Dates: 2025 Prep, 2026 Enforcement
Think of this in two phases:
2025 – Visibility and preparation
- Microsoft has shipped better reporting in the Power Platform Admin Center (PPAC) so you can see which users need which license.
- User Security Governance (USG) and the User License Summary reports are now generally available in F&O. These tools show, per user, which license level their roles require.
- From late 2025, users who don’t have the right license start seeing in-app warnings prompting them to contact an admin. They can still work, but the system is telling you to fix issues before enforcement hits.
Be Compliant
- From January 15, 2026, Microsoft begins turning on per-user license validation for each customer as they hit their contract renewal or anniversary date.
- Around that date, you can expect:
- A review window to clean up mismatches
- In-app warnings for at-risk users
- A short grace period
- Then hard enforcement: users with the wrong or missing license lose access to F&O apps until it’s corrected in Microsoft 365 admin center.
New SKUs and Pricing You Can’t Ignore
Alongside enforcement, Microsoft has introduced new premium tiers and raised prices for some workloads:
- Finance Premium adds advanced FP&A and planning capabilities on top of Dynamics 365 Finance.
- SCM Premium adds advanced capabilities such as Demand Planning on top of Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management.
- As of late 2024, list prices for Finance and SCM have increased, so older business cases may underestimate license costs.
The message: don’t just count licenses. Check which licenses you’re using and whether certain users genuinely need Premium capabilities.
How Licenses Are Assigned and Measured
There are three main places to care about:
Microsoft 365 Admin Center
This is your source of truth for license assignment. Every user who works in Finance, SCM, Commerce, HR, or Project Ops must have the correct license here. If it’s wrong here, it will be wrong when enforcement starts.
Power Platform Admin Center (PPAC)
PPAC gives you a cross-tenant view of:
- How many licenses you have
- How they’re being consumed
- Which users fall into Base, Attach, or Team Member–style license buckets
It connects the dots between security roles, workloads, and license needs.
User Security Governance (USG) in F&O
USG is the engine behind all of this on the F&O side. It:
- Analyzes roles, duties, and privileges
- Calculates the license level each user needs based on their highest privilege
- Highlights over-licensing and under-licensing
- Lets you test “what if we change this role?” in a safe environment
Roles Drive Licensing – Not Job Titles
Licensing is determined by what users can do in the system, not by their job description.
In practice:
- A user whose role includes powerful finance or supply chain duties will require a full (base) license, even if their title is “assistant” or “coordinator”.
- Users who only need to view data or approve items might qualify for Activity or Team Member licenses – but only if their roles don’t include higher-privilege tasks.
- If a custom role accidentally includes a high-impact duty, that user’s required license level goes up.
That’s why USG is so important: it shows the license impact of your actual security design, not just your intentions.
A Simple 5-Step Action Plan
Here’s a practical way to get ready:
Inventory users and licenses
Pull a list of F&O users and their licenses from Microsoft 365 admin center and compare it with who is actually using the system.
Turn on and use USG
Make sure User Security Governance is enabled. Review the User License Summary and identify under-licensed and over-licensed users.
Clean up roles
Retire unused roles, simplify overlapping ones, and make sure light users aren’t assigned high-privilege duties by accident.
Work backwards from your renewal date
Confirm your next contract renewal or anniversary date and set internal milestones a few months before that to complete clean-up and testing.
Educate IT and business owners
Give simple guidance on full vs light vs Premium licenses so managers don’t request the wrong license by default.
How Korcomptenz Can Help
As a Microsoft Solution Partner with deep Dynamics 365 Finance & Supply Chain experience, Korcomptenz can help you:
- Read and interpret USG and PPAC reports
- Redesign roles to balance security, compliance, and cost
- Decide who truly needs Finance Premium or SCM Premium
- Plan your journey to the 2026 enforcement date with minimal disruption
If you want to turn this from a compliance headache into an opportunity to clean up roles, cut waste, and strengthen governance, talk to Korcomptenz for a free consultation.
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