Contracts, licences and consumables

AegisOne holds contract records, licence entitlements and consumable inventory per client, in the same system as the endpoints those things relate to. Keeping the commercial layer next to the technical one is not a filing preference; it is what makes reconciliation possible at all.

A contract record captures what you agreed to deliver — the commercial shape of the relationship. Licence records capture entitlement and assignment: what the client is entitled to, and what is actually consuming it. Consumable inventory tracks stock you hold and issue against a client.

Keep contracts current, particularly through change. The most common source of leakage is not a missing contract, it is a contract that describes an arrangement two amendments out of date. Devices get added at a client's request, in good faith, in a conversation that never becomes a contractual change. Twelve months later you are supporting a materially larger estate at the original price, and nobody involved did anything wrong.

Licence drift is the same problem in a different currency. Seats get assigned when someone joins and rarely released when they leave, so consumption climbs steadily above entitlement until a vendor audit turns a gradual drift into a sudden bill.

Consumables behave differently from both and are worth tracking properly rather than approximately, because they are the items most likely to be issued against a client without ever reaching an invoice — the replacement keyboard, the cable, the spare adapter that was easier to hand over than to raise a line item for.

Once contracts and licences are current, the reconciliation run has something to compare the estate against. Reconciliation is only as good as the entitlement data behind it, which means the unglamorous work of keeping contract records accurate is what determines whether the leakage figure is a finding or a guess.