The Azure Enterprise Agreement, the EA, is the legacy framework: an enrollment with departments and accounts beneath it, a prepaid annual monetary commitment, and management through the Enterprise portal. The Microsoft Customer Agreement, the MCA, is the modern replacement: a billing account with billing profiles and invoice sections, monthly invoicing, and native cost management in the Azure portal. Both run the same Azure services at the same underlying prices, but the MCA changes the billing hierarchy, moves you to monthly invoices, and tracks the Microsoft Azure Consumption Commitment, the MACC, inside the agreement. If you are migrating, the work is mostly remapping cost allocation to the new hierarchy.
Here is what differs and what to do about it.
What is the difference between EA and MCA?
The EA is built around an enrollment. Beneath it sit departments, then accounts, then subscriptions, and a prepaid monetary commitment is drawn down as you consume. Administration lives in the Enterprise portal, separate from the Azure portal. It has served large enterprises for years and many still run on it.
The MCA is built around a billing account that contains one or more billing profiles, each of which produces its own monthly invoice and contains invoice sections for grouping cost. Everything is managed inside the Azure portal through Cost Management, with no separate Enterprise portal. Microsoft positions the MCA as the future and has been transitioning EA enrollments to it.
How does the billing hierarchy differ?
This is the change that matters most for cost allocation, because your chargeback model is usually built on the hierarchy.
| Concept | Enterprise Agreement | Microsoft Customer Agreement |
|---|---|---|
| Top container | Enrollment | Billing account |
| Grouping level | Department, then account | Billing profile, then invoice section |
| Invoice | Annual against prepaid commitment | Monthly per billing profile |
| Admin surface | Enterprise portal | Azure portal Cost Management |
A billing profile is the unit that gets an invoice and a payment method, so it often maps to a business unit. Invoice sections sit inside it for finer grouping. Teams that ran chargeback off EA departments need to decide which profile and section each cost belongs to before they migrate, or allocation breaks on day one.
What changes for cost allocation and reporting?
Under the MCA, Cost Management lives entirely in the Azure portal and reports at the billing profile and invoice section level, with tags and subscriptions underneath. Monthly invoicing means cost lands and reconciles every month rather than drawing down a single annual pool, which most finance teams find easier to forecast and close. The cost data export and the FOCUS aligned schema also differ from the EA usage export, so any pipeline reading raw billing data needs updating. The mechanics of those exports are covered in Azure cost exports and FOCUS data.
Reservations and the Azure savings plan for compute behave consistently across both, but their scope and benefit assignment are managed against the billing hierarchy, so a migration is the moment to review how commitment benefit is shared. See Azure savings plan versus reservations for that trade.
How does MACC drawdown work under each?
The Microsoft Azure Consumption Commitment is a multi year commitment to spend a set amount on eligible Azure services in exchange for negotiated terms. It carries a shortfall clause: if you do not consume the committed amount by the end of the term, you still owe the gap. Under the MCA, MACC drawdown is tracked inside the agreement in the Azure portal, so you can watch consumption against the commitment directly. The discipline of pacing that drawdown so you neither underspend nor scramble at term end is the same under both frameworks and is covered in decoding Azure credits and MACC drawdown and Azure spend versus the MACC clock.
Should you migrate, and how?
A European SaaS company on a long standing EA was transitioned to an MCA and lost its chargeback model overnight, because cost had been allocated by EA department and the new billing profiles did not match the old structure. We mapped each department and account to a billing profile and invoice section before the cutover, rebuilt the cost export pipeline against the new schema, and re pointed reservation benefit to the right scope. Allocation held through the migration and the monthly invoicing actually tightened the forecast. Figures are verified against billing data and anonimised.
Migration is often driven by Microsoft rather than chosen, so the question is usually how, not whether. Treat it as a cost allocation project, not just a contract swap: map the hierarchy first, update any billing data pipeline to the new schema, review commitment scope, and confirm MACC tracking carries over. Done in that order, the move is clean. The full Azure picture sits in the Azure cost optimization guide.
Frequently asked questions
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