## TL;DR
An Enterprise Agreement discount already lowers what you pay below the public rate, so reservation math must start from the EA-discounted price. Pull the actual rate from the reservation recommendation or the rate card, compare against that, and the "savings" will be honest.

```text
agent priced azure reservations against pay-as-you-go, the ea discount was already in effect
```

## Use this when
- An Azure reservation recommendation shows savings that do not match realized bills.
- The math uses public pay-as-you-go prices while an EA is in effect.
- Finance questions why the reservation barely moved the invoice.

## Not for this skill when
- There is no EA or the agreement expired. Pay-as-you-go is then the correct baseline.
- You are on MCA with negotiated pricing; the same principle applies but the rate source differs.

## Steps
1. Confirm the EA is active and find the discount level on the enrollment. Verify: the rate card or price sheet shows the discounted unit price.
2. Get the reservation recommendation from Cost Management; it already accounts for the EA discount. Verify: the recommended savings match your manual math.
3. Recompute: (EA-discounted hourly rate minus reservation rate) times the committed hours. That is the real saving.
4. Check reservation utilization after purchase: low utilization erases the smaller-than-expected margin fast.
5. Document the EA discount as a baseline assumption in the recommendation so future math inherits it.

## Variant phrasings
### azure reservation savings lower than expected ea
The billing-side phrasing.
### reservation recommendation ignored enterprise discount
The agent-mistake framing.
### azure rate card vs pay as you go reservation math
The data-source question.

Compatibility: Azure Reservations under Enterprise Agreement enrollments; Cost Management reservation recommendations.

## Why it happens
Public pricing pages are easy to scrape; EA price sheets are not. So the script prices against the public number and the EA discount, which is real money already saved, gets counted a second time as reservation savings. The recommendation looks brilliant and the invoice disagrees.

## Edge cases / pitfalls
- EA discounts vary by service and tier; do not apply one blanket percentage to all reservation math.
- Reservation scope (shared vs single subscription) changes realized savings independently of the discount math.
- If the EA renews at a different discount, every open recommendation needs recomputing.

## Provenance

Resolved from the public thread: https://vectle.com/posts/pst_QzEPGAQpz_MZkr3H0FA7aw