Software licenses
Keep a register of software subscriptions — their plans, seats and renewal dates — and track who is using each seat.
What you can do here
- Keep one register of every software subscription you pay for.
- Record what each costs, per plan and per seat.
- Assign seats to people and take them back.
- See what's about to renew, and what you're paying for but not using.
The register
Software Licenses lists each one with its Name, Vendor, Seats, Availability, Renewal date, whether it's Recurring, and its Status. Filter by status — Active, Expired, or Cancelled.
Availability is the column that saves money: it shows seats free against seats paid for. A licence sitting at full availability is a renewal worth questioning.
Common tasks
Add a licence
- Add a new one and fill in the software name, Vendor, Billing cycle, and Renewal date.
- Add the plan rows. Each has a Plan / Edition, its Seats, and a Price / seat, with an Amount per row and a Total underneath — so a product with a mix of editions is recorded as it's actually bought.
- Choose whether it's company-wide or scoped to particular business units.
- Save.
Assign a seat
Open the licence and assign it while seats remain. Pick the Employee and confirm. Used seats go up by one, and the assignment records Assigned By and Assigned At.
Take a seat back
Find the person in the licence's active assignments and revoke it. The record keeps Revoked At alongside who assigned it, so the history of a seat stays readable rather than the row just disappearing.
Revoking is what frees the seat for someone else — it's the step most often forgotten when somebody changes role.
Watch renewals
The list highlights licences due to renew soon, and a summary counts those falling in the next month. Renewal dates are the whole reason to keep this register current: the cost of a forgotten subscription is paid silently.
Good to know
- Seats Usage on a licence shows where your money is going. Consistently unused seats are worth dropping at the next renewal.
- Use the notes on a licence for the things that aren't fields — who owns the vendor relationship, what the contract says about mid-term changes.
- When someone leaves, their seats don't free themselves. Revoking is a separate step, and it's the one that stops you paying for departed colleagues.
- Licences are separate from assets. Hardware issued to someone is tracked as an asset; a subscription seat is tracked here.