Licence management has two failure modes that pull in opposite directions: under-licensed and exposed at audit, or over-licensed and paying for seats nobody uses. This tracker shows both gaps in the same view.
Record the licence metric as well as the count. Per user, per device, per core, per concurrent session. These produce very different compliance positions from the same deployment. Getting the metric wrong is the usual cause of a surprise audit finding.
Track deployed and actively used separately. Deployed tells you your compliance exposure. Actively used tells you your reclaim opportunity. Most organisations need both numbers and track only one.
Reclaim at offboarding, not at renewal. Make licence reclamation a step in IT offboarding. Waiting until renewal means paying for departed staff for up to a year.
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| Product | Vendor | Licence metric | Entitled | Deployed | Active (90d) | Compliance | Waste | Annual cost | Renewal |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Productivity suite E3 | Microsoft | Per user | 160 | 152 | 141 | Compliant | 11 unused | £31,200 | 2027-04-01 |
| Design suite | Adobe | Per user | 12 | 14 | 9 | SHORT BY 2 | 5 unused | £7,100 | 2027-02-15 |
More free templates IT teams use alongside this one.
The expensive date is not the renewal. It is the notice deadline, typically 30 to 90 days earlier, after which you are committed for another year whatever you decide. This tracker is built around that date.
SaaS spend accumulates outside procurement, one card payment at a time, until nobody can say how many tools the organisation pays for. This inventory is built to surface those as much as the sanctioned ones.
Offboarding fails in the gaps: the SaaS tool bought on a card that is not in your identity provider, the personal device nobody logged, the shared mailbox still forwarding. This checklist is ordered by risk and by clock, so the things that must happen inside the hour are not sitting below the laptop return.
Per product: the vendor, the licence metric from the contract, entitlements held, deployments found, active usage over 90 days, the resulting compliance position, annual cost, and renewal date.
Because per user, per device, per core, and per concurrent session produce completely different compliance positions from the same deployment. Assuming the wrong metric is the most common cause of an unexpected audit shortfall.
Track active usage over 90 days alongside deployment, and make licence reclamation a step in IT offboarding rather than something done at renewal. Waiting for renewal means paying for departed staff for up to a year.
