Specify a unit price for a monitored product

Software license monitoring (SLM) includes several different calculations related to license usage in your organization. For example, the Compliance dashboard includes an estimate of the cost to bring installed products into compliance with your license terms.

For every product that is monitored, you can specify the unit cost that is used in these calculations. The cost you specify may be different than the cost that is automatically calculated.

In situations where you have one license for one product, you can use the automatic calculation that takes the total price of the license and divides it by the number of licenses.

In situations where you have more than one license for a product, you might have different unit costs based on the terms of the license. For example, if you have purchased a license for one version of a product and then purchased a new license for a newer version, the newer product may cost more. If you can use these licenses for both the older and newer version of the product, you'll need to determine which price represents the actual cost you want to use in calculations.

There are two options for specifying a unit price:

  • Use automatically calculated unit price in all calculations: If you select this option, calculations are based on the license data for the product. If there is one license, the unit price is calculated by dividing the total cost by the number of licenses. If there are multiple licenses for a product, the unit price is the average of the unit cost of all licenses for the product (all total costs divided by the number of all licenses).
  • Specify a unit price for use in all calculations: If you select this option, the price you enter replaces any automatic calculations for the product. For example, if you have several different licenses for a product, you can specify the current price per license because that is the price you would pay to add new licenses.

If you find calculations in the Dashboard that seem incorrect, you should check that all licenses for a product have correct cost information entered. You can then decide whether to change the unit price for the product to accurately represent the cost of licenses for the product.

NOTE: If you’re using the French-language version of SLM, Microsoft has a bug in their regional settings that affects French-language digit groupings. For numbers of one thousand and over, Microsoft has a default setting of a space character instead of a period for the digit-grouping symbol (for example, 1 234 567,00). Because of this bug, when entering numbers in the French-language version, SLM will not allow the period character to be used.

To fix this problem, you must change the setting in the Control Panel > Region and Language applet. Click the Additional settings button, and change the Digit grouping symbol from a space to a period (or whatever other character you want).

To specify a product's unit price
  1. Click Products > Monitored and select the product (using the Search box, if needed, to find the product).
  2. On the toolbar, click Edit.
  3. Click Unit price.
  4. Select the automatically calculated price, or click Specify a unit price and enter a cost in the unit price box.
  5. Click Save.

Note that if you select a normalized product, you should be sure that the unit cost represents all versions of the product that are included in the normalized product.