Installed is a fact about a PC. Licensed is a fact about your paperwork. They are counted in different places — and confusing them is how offices end up both non-compliant and overpaying at the same time. Here is the reconciliation routine.
When a software audit letter arrives, the vendor counts installations and compares them with licences you bought. You can run exactly that comparison yourself, any time, because PDQ Inventory already knows the installed half: every application's name and version on every PC, from every scan. The other half — what you own — lives in invoices and licence portals. This guide is the honest routine for putting the two lists side by side, and it starts with the rule in the title: installed is not the same as licensed, in either direction.
PDQ gives precise, dated install counts per application and version across the whole network. It cannot know your licence terms: whether a licence is per PC, per user, a subscription seat, OEM-tied to one machine, or includes downgrade rights. That knowledge is paperwork. Anyone who tells you an inventory tool "handles licensing" is selling you the counting half and staying quiet about the terms half.
Create a report grouped by application and version from the Applications data, and export it. Watch for the classic distorter: the same product appearing under two name variants (a publisher rename between versions, or 32-bit and 64-bit editions listed separately). Merge variants deliberately, in writing, so your count is defensible — an auditor will count them their way, and you want your number to survive the comparison.
Start with the ten most expensive applications, not the free utilities. For each: licences owned (from invoices and vendor portals) versus installations found. Two gaps are possible, and both cost money — installed more than owned is a compliance risk to fix promptly; owned more than installed is shelfware you are renewing for nobody.
Where you are over, you have two honest moves: remove the software from PCs that do not need it (Inventory's own remote uninstall handles one-offs; PDQ Deploy handles it at scale), or buy the shortfall and document it. What you must not do is nothing — a gap you found yourself and fixed is a good story; the same gap found by a vendor audit is a bill with penalties.
Per-user subscriptions like Microsoft 365 assign licences to people in the vendor's admin portal, while PDQ counts installations on PCs — one user may legitimately have the apps on a desktop and a laptop. Reconcile subscriptions in the portal (assigned versus actually signed-in users) and use PDQ only to find machines running the software for users who left or were never assigned a seat.
Save the count report and the reconciliation sheet together, dated. Run the same routine every six months: joiners, leavers and one careless install drive drift faster than anyone expects. The offices that pass audits calmly are not the ones with perfect fleets — they are the ones with a dated paper trail showing they count and correct continuously.
Pull the application counts as this guide describes, then use the video's software inventory tour to find every field in your own console.
▶️ Watch Full VideoNo — that is not what it is for. It inventories which applications and versions are installed on each computer. Your keys, agreements and purchase records stay in your own licence file or the vendor's portal, and the reconciliation in this guide is where the two meet.
Yes — the next scan records it like any other application, which is exactly why the count routine matters. Shadow installs are the most common source of over-install gaps in small offices, and the inventory is how you find them before a vendor does.
As accurate as your last scans. PCs that have not scanned recently may have added or removed software since. Before any audit-grade count, make sure every managed PC has a recent successful scan — and list the unscanned ones separately rather than pretending they are zero.