Best Practice for Perpetual Entitlements with Maintenance

[Stephen42]

Hi all, I am hoping you can assist with this question as we are seeing some odd results in license workbench for software titles that are perpetual with maintenance.  I am looking for best practice as within entitlements, perpetual license types do not require Start/End dates, and yet maintenance license types do.  So here is the scenario.

I have an entitlement, perpetual and maintenance for Jan 21 through Dec 21, then only maintenance Jan 22 through Dec 22, and Jan 23 through Dec 23.   

If I only enter the most recent maintenance entitlement, I lose the original license costs, and the amounts on the various reports/dashboards don't really show 'true' license costs, in other words, the true up and over-licensed aren't really accurate.

If I enter the original entitlement, as perpetual + maintenance I am forced to enter Start/End dates, in this case 2021, and then each individual maintenance entitlement for years 2022 + 2023.  This again, due to dates, seems to alter costs on the dashboards.

So, should I be entering the original perpetual entitlement without the maintenance, thus no Start/End date, and then each maintenance separately for subsequent years so the dashboards reflect full license costs ?

What's the best practice here given the way SAM Pro functions.

Thanks in advance

[Amanda6]

Following, as we need the answer to this question too.. 
@Stephen42 - have you had to load any s/w that is only perpetual? and what did you do to historical licences, ie say you bought some in 2020, 2021 etc and then installed SAM in 2023 - did you add these as separate lines or just group them together?

[Stephen42]

Amanda,

EXACTLY what we are trying to sort out.  Hopefully we will get more replies.

Cheers!

[JenD_UA]

Hi @Stephen42 , I am curious...have you tried creating the original license as perpetual, tied to a contract and then use the contract to track the maintenance renewals?  I have been told that is "best practice" by a consultant and then the contract is what gets renewed.  I can see where this would help keep the original license cost for the over/under metric, however it makes me wonder if you would have to manually add the new versions received under maintenance.  Maybe those are just new entitlements to the contract with a price override?

[Stephen42]

Thanks JenD

Unfortunately, we don't have the Contracts functionality fired up, so I am still needing best practice on this.  The system supports Perpetual & Maintainance so I'm not sure why I can't seem to get a direct answer.   Users are now starting to question the calculations on the various dashboards and I have no answers for them

-Stephen