Enhancement for Purchase Records

Enhanced functionality in the Unprocessed Purchases page (if you are upgrading from a release prior to 2016 R1) may require that you re-process some purchase records. The process is described below. These prior notes provide background understanding of causes and impacts.

The enhancement is:

• In prior releases, a purchase (of an appropriate type) appeared in this Unprocessed Purchases listing only when it was not linked to a license. The test did not take any account of quantities that were linked from the purchase to one or more licenses — as long as there was at least one link between the purchase record and a license, the purchase was counted as 'processed'.
• From release 2016 R1, FlexNet Manager Suite better supports splitting purchases of relevant types (including maintenance) across multiple licenses. As part of this improved functionality, it now examines each purchase to compare the quantity purchased with the quantity assigned to one or more licenses. Any time that the quantity assigned is less than the quantity purchased, the purchase is included in the Unprocessed Purchases listing. This allows you to use this listing as a work center for purchase processing, especially when you are splitting purchases across multiple licenses. The purchase is automatically removed from the listing as you assign the last of its purchased quantity to a license.

Depending on your previous work practices, this enhancement may cause some purchases previously processed to reappear in the Unprocessed Purchases listing after upgrade. This is more likely to occur for purchases of type Software Maintenance, and will occur if your previous practice has been to manually set the purchase quantity for a maintenance purchase to zero as you linked it to a license.*

In those cases where you had manually set the assignment from a maintenance purchase to a license to zero, there is an ongoing mismatch between the quantity purchased and the quantity assigned to the relevant license(s). After your upgrade, this mismatch correctly causes the purchase to appear in the enhanced Unprocessed Purchases listing. (The same is true of any other cases of historical purchases where, for any reason, the purchased quantity does not match the total assignments to licenses.) Since every purchase record is checked for this listing (no matter how old), you may rely on it catching all historical cases where the mismatch between purchased quantity and assigned quantity exists.

To identify and reprocess purchases if required:

1. In the web interface for FlexNet Manager Suite, navigate to Procurement > Unprocessed Purchases (in the Purchases group).
   The listing includes all historical purchases for which there is an Available quantity (which is the difference between the purchased quantity and the total assigned to all linked licenses).
2. Select one or more rows from the listing.
3. Click Recalculate.
   After a moment, unprocessed purchases may show updated values for Recommended licenses. In the cases described above, the recommendation is most often to link (once again) to the same license(s) you had previously linked to each purchase. Review all recommendations.
4. Select only those purchases with recommendations that you find acceptable, and click Accept.
   Tip: The Accept button is enabled only when you select purchases with recommended licenses. You cannot include any rows where the Recommended licenses column displays No recommendation calculated,

   FlexNet Manager Suite creates the appropriate links to the recommended licenses (including correcting the link types of those purchases that had been incorrectly linked before, so that their maintenance had been wrongly counted towards entitlements).
5. If there are remaining historical purchases that still require processing, select one at a time and click Process.
   A blue wizard area appears above the listing to assist with your processing choices. For details, click the online help button in the top right of the Unprocessed Purchases page.
6. Repeat as required until all the historical purchase records have been reprocessed.

The necessary reprocessing is completed, and entitlement counts and maintenance coverage correctly reflect your input data.

Tip: For Software Maintenance purchases, be sure to record the effective date and the expiry date on each maintenance purchase. This allows the system to automatically calculate coverage, alert you to forthcoming renewals, and so on.

* One reason you may have used this approach is because of an early defect, since repaired, that incorrectly counted maintenance purchases toward license entitlements. This error only occurred when:

• The purchase was manually linked to the license (it did not occur when purchase automation was used)
• The link was manually made from the purchase properties (it did not occur when the link was made from the license end of the relationship).

(Historical purchase records affected by the old defect are visible in the Purchases tab of the license properties, where you can examine the Purchase type and License entitlements columns. Any linked purchase of type Software maintenance should have no value shown for License entitlements. Cases where you had adjusted the assigned quantity manually are detected and repaired as described here; and any cases where you did not notice this old error are now likely to be flagged in license listings with an alert that there is a mismatch between the software entitlements and the maintenance coverage.)