Software register

A software register is a single, maintained record of every piece of software an organisation uses. For each tool it captures the essentials: who owns it, what it costs, when it renews, its notice period, and where the contract lives.

The register is the foundation of renewal tracking and software asset management. Without one, renewals are managed from memory and scattered spreadsheets, which is how deadlines get missed.

Export the card payments for last month and you have forty transactions to forty vendors. That tells you precisely what left the bank and almost nothing you need in order to decide anything. It does not say which of the forty renews in March, which needs ninety days notice (so the decision was really due in December), which is a perpetual licence that will not renew at all, or who to ask whether a tool is still being used.

What turns that payment list into something you can act on is only a handful of fields: an owner, a renewal date, a notice period, whether it auto-renews, and the licence type. Four of those five never appear on an invoice, which is why a finance export cannot become a register by itself, however carefully it is sorted.

The register is the main view in the product: one row per tool. It opens on a deliberately compact set of columns (vendor, owner, category, billing cost, status, renewal date and expiry), and the Columns menu adds the rest when you want them, including annual cost, the cancel-by date, the notice period, business unit, customer and criticality. Category, status, owner and criticality filter the list, with a customer filter that appears once any record has a customer on it.

The columns that carry the decisions are calculated rather than typed. Annual cost is derived from the cost and the billing cycle, the effective end date from the renewal date and the auto-renew flag, and the cancel-by date from the notice period, so none of them can drift out of step with the record the way a hand-maintained spreadsheet column does. A tool you have finished with can be archived rather than deleted: it keeps its history, its documents and its price record, and it still counts toward the plan allowance, but it drops out of the dashboard, the reports and the reminder emails. Archiving is for tools you have genuinely stopped running, not a way to tidy the list.