Anniversary month, again
The customer's agreement anniversary is six weeks away. Under their volume agreement they need to report any growth in users or devices since last year. Your account manager emails their IT manager asking for the numbers. Two weeks later a spreadsheet arrives with a count that is obviously wrong, because it includes disabled accounts. Another week goes on getting a clean number. Then someone has to compare it with what the customer already owns, work out the difference by product, price it and build the order.
Multiply that by every customer with an anniversary in the same quarter and the true-up season takes over the team.
Why true-ups keep turning into a scramble
A true-up asks the customer to count something they do not normally count, in a way that matches how the vendor defines it: named users, devices, cores, qualified desktops, whatever the agreement says. The customer's IT team has the raw data in their admin consoles, but not in that shape. Your team has the entitlement data, but in old orders and vendor portals. The comparison happens in a spreadsheet built fresh each year.
Definitions matter here and they come from the customer's agreement. We do not interpret licensing terms; the vendor, your licensing specialists and the customer decide what counts. The process problem is collecting the numbers early and comparing them reliably.
| Input | Who has it | Usual problem |
|---|---|---|
| Current usage counts | Customer IT | Includes inactive accounts or test devices |
| What was already bought | You and the vendor | Spread across years of orders |
| Agreement anniversary | Vendor portal | Not in your CRM |
| Price for additions | Distributor or vendor price sheet | Changes between years |
What a late or messy true-up costs
Missed deadlines cause friction with the vendor and the customer. Counts that are too low store up trouble for later, and counts that are too high mean the customer pays for things they do not use, which they will discover eventually and hold against you.
For your team, it is weeks of chasing a handful of people for numbers, at the same time as normal renewals and new business. The customers who are easy get done; the complicated ones slip to the last day.
The true-up process we build
- Calendar: each customer's agreement anniversary and reporting deadline is held in a register, with the true-up process starting at the lead time your team chooses.
- Entitlement baseline: what the customer already owns under the agreement is assembled from your order history and the vendor's entitlement data, per product.
- Customer request: the customer's contact receives a short form asking for the specific counts their agreement needs, with guidance your licensing team writes on what to include and exclude.
- Admin exports: where the customer is willing, they can upload an export from their admin console instead of typing numbers, and the counts are read from it, with inactive or test items listed for them to confirm.
- Comparison: counts are compared with entitlement per product and the difference is calculated, with any drop in usage flagged separately because it may need a different conversation.
- Draft order: the additions are priced from current pricing and a draft true-up quote is created for the account manager to check and send.
Chasers go out automatically if the form is not completed, and the account manager sees which customers have not responded, well before the deadline.
True-up season with a process behind it
Instead of a month of email threads, the account manager has a list: customers who have submitted, customers who have not, and draft quotes ready for review. The comparison is the same every year, so last year's numbers are there to check against and odd jumps stand out.
The customer's IT manager gets a clear, short request rather than a vague email, which is often what gets it answered.
Is true-up season taking over your team?
- True-up counts arrive late or need several rounds of correction.
- Each year's comparison is built in a new spreadsheet.
- Agreement anniversaries are not recorded in your CRM.
- Customers have questioned true-up numbers after the order was placed.
- One licensing specialist carries all the knowledge of how counts work.