Two numbers decide whether your office is compliant or overspending: how many copies are installed, and how many licences you actually bought. Endpoint Central's License Manager exists to put those two numbers face to face.
Software licensing trouble in a small office rarely looks dramatic. It looks like this: the accounts package is installed on fourteen PCs because 'it might be needed', the company bought ten licences — and nobody knows either number until an auditor, or a renewal quote, asks. The software inventory in Endpoint Central produces the first number automatically, from scans. The License Manager stores the second number, the one from your purchase records. This guide shows how to make both numbers true and what to do when they disagree — in either direction.
The installed count comes from the software inventory: every scan reports each PC's installed applications with versions. Before trusting it, clean the obvious noise — the same product appearing under slightly different names across versions, trial copies installed once and forgotten, and bundled components counted as separate products. Endpoint Central lets you group software so 'the same product, several spellings' counts as one line. Ten minutes of grouping work here saves an argument with an auditor later, because a compliance conversation is only as good as the installed list it starts from.
In the License Manager, record each paid product with the number of licences purchased, the licence type and the expiry date. Use purchase invoices, not memory. Include the awkward ones: the OEM copies that came with specific PCs (they live and die with that hardware), the subscription seats that renew monthly, the one boxed copy from 2019 that everyone assumes still exists. If a licence cannot be evidenced by any document, count it as not owned until the paper turns up — in an audit, an unprovable licence and a missing licence are the same thing.
When installed exceeds purchased, you have a compliance gap: uninstall the extra copies or buy the difference — those are the only two honest endings, and the console's per-machine list tells you exactly which PCs to visit. When purchased exceeds installed, you have money asleep: at the next renewal, cut the subscription to the installed count plus sensible headroom. Offices routinely discover both gaps at once on different products — over on the tool everyone installs casually, under on the tool bought in bulk 'for growth' that never came. The License Manager's over-usage and under-usage notifications exist so these gaps surface at renewal time, not audit time.
Licence truth decays the same way hardware truth does — through unrecorded changes. Build two reflexes: every software purchase gets entered in the License Manager the week it is paid for, and every bulk install or removal is followed by a fresh scan and a look at the compliance view. A five-minute monthly glance at that one screen is the entire ongoing cost. The offices that fail audits are almost never the ones that bought too few licences; they are the ones whose records and reality quietly divorced over three years of nobody looking.
See every screen from this guide live in the video — hardware inventory, software inventory, the License Manager and the alerts, on a real Endpoint Central console.
▶️ Watch Full VideoNo — no tool can. The agent measures what is installed; the purchased counts, licence types and expiry dates are entered by you in the License Manager from your purchase records. The tool's job is the trustworthy comparison between the two.
Over-usage means more copies are installed than licences owned — a compliance risk to fix by uninstalling or buying. Under-usage means licences are owned but not installed — money being spent on nothing, to fix at renewal.
Yes, and it is the most common source of a scary-looking report. Group name variants of the same product, and note trials and OEM-bundled copies correctly, before drawing conclusions from the totals.