Processing a Maintenance Purchase

IT Asset Management (Cloud)

The 'purchase processing wizard' refers to the blue pop-up work area of the Unprocessed Purchases page. The appearance and behavior of this wizard varies depending on all aspects of the purchase. To simplify description, this topic addresses only one case:

Purchasing or renewing maintenance for a license (without adding license entitlements).

Eventually, each license requires either that it has no maintenance attached, or that the maintenance coverage is an exact match for the number of entitlements on the license. However, it is not necessary to match the maintenance quantity against the number of entitlements on a license before processing a maintenance purchase:

• When a purchase provides more maintenance than there are entitlements on a license, you can split the purchase to apply its maintenance to multiple separate licenses. Simply work through this procedure multiple times, once for each affected license, sharing out the purchase quantities as you wish.
• When a purchase provides insufficient maintenance coverage for the entitlements on a license, you may either find another purchase to top up the maintenance, or split the license into two (one license with maintenance and one without) to account for the different product use rights that apply with/without maintenance. This quite commonly happens with maintenance renewals, where you may decide not to renew for license entitlements that are now surplus to requirements. For more about realigning the maintenance (usually by splitting the related licenses), see Moving Maintenance Between Licenses.

Start this procedure from the Unprocessed Purchases page.

Tip: When processing a Software Maintenance purchase, the license(s) to which the maintenance is to be applied must exist before you start processing the purchase.

To process maintenance purchases (both new and renewals):

1. Select the appropriate row(s) from the list of unprocessed purchases.
   You may select multiple purchases, as long as they all have a Purchase type of Software maintenance. (If your selection includes other types, the Process button remains disabled. Try selecting fewer purchases.) If you choose multiple purchases, the proposed maintenance expiry date for the license is taken from the latest expiry on the selected purchases (although you can manually adjust this date if necessary).

   Tip: Try grouping your results by the Action column (available in the column chooser). This lets you focus on a subset of purchases that need similar processing.
2. Click Process.
   A new processing area opens above the list. The Max. available field shows the total maintenance coverage still available through the selected purchase(s) (more details available below).
3. Choose one of the following, depending on whether you are processing one purchase, or multiple purchases that all apply to the same license:
   • For a single purchase: If required, adjust the Quantity to process field, either by typing in a value or using the spinner controls, to set the number to assign to the license you will identify shortly.

     By default, this quantity to process is the same as the Max. available field, meaning that if you make no change to the value, you assign all the available maintenance to the one license. If you set the Quantity to process field to a lower value, you are splitting the purchase across multiple licenses, and can make another pass through this wizard later to assign the remaining maintenance.

   • For multiple purchases: The list of selected purchases includes a column labeled To be processed, and you can separately adjust the quantity to assign to the one license from each of the listed purchases. If, for any purchase, you set the To be processed field to a lower value than its Max. available, you are splitting that purchase across multiple licenses, and can make another pass through this wizard later to assign the remaining quantity to a different license. When you are satisfied with the settings (described in the following table) for this pass, click Apply entitlements (which in this case means the number of entitlements to which maintenance is applied by this purchase).
     While you are processing multiple purchases, the list of selected purchases includes these columns:

     Purchase order no.

     The identifying code of the purchase order authorizing the purchase.

     Description

     Details of the item purchased.

     Purchase type

     The nature of this purchase, such as software, hardware, maintenance and so on. Determines whether automated processing of the purchase can occur, and whether the purchase can contribute to license entitlements.

     Tip: At purchase processing time, when the purchase is linked to a license, the purchase type from a recognized SKU is given priority over this Purchase type set in the purchase properties. It is best practice to keep these two values aligned.

     For a separate maintenance purchase or renewal, only the value Software maintenance should be displayed.

     Effective quantity

     Total number of units acquired with this purchase. Depending on purchase type, these 'units' may be license entitlements, or maintenance coverage for this number of license entitlements.

     In this case, the quantity is the count of license entitlements covered by the purchased maintenance.

     Max. available

     When no maintenance has previously been assigned from this purchase, the Max. available is the same as the Effective quantity. However, if you have previously assigned some maintenance to another license, this shows the remainder, which is the most that you can assign from this purchase to a different license.

     To be processed

     By default, this shows the same as the Max. available column, and you cannot increase it past that maximum value. However, you can use the spinner controls (or type directly into the field) to adjust the number to a lesser value if you want to assign less maintenance coverage from this purchase to your target license. Mix and match the quantities from your multiple purchases as you require.

     When you have specified the quantities to be processed from each of your multiple selected purchases, click Apply entitlements to move to the next page of the wizard.
4. Choose an option from the Apply to drop-down list:

   a recommended license

   This option is selected by default when the system suggests suitable licenses in the list below. The list of suggested licenses displays:

   • Priority, as determined through the internal recommendation process
   • License, displaying the Name from the license properties
   • Reason, being a note of explanation about why this license appears. For example, a license may be recommended because the purchase Matches an application version lower than the highest available (meaning that the only match is against an earlier version of the application).

   To choose a license from this list of suggestions, select that row of the list.

   an existing license (search)

   Choose this when you know that an appropriate license exists, but it has not been selected by the automated process (when no license is recommended, this choice is the default). With this choice, a new Licenses control is shown below the drop-down list: click in the field to activate the Search control. Optionally, enter a few characters from the license name or publisher to focus the returned set of licenses; and click Search (details of the search result fields are in Fields Available in License Search Results). Select one license from the search results, and click Add license.
   When the license question is settled, the Set maintenance button is enabled.
5. Click Set maintenance.
   Tip: Ideally, the maintenance details should be set in the General tab of the purchase properties, and if present there, they are copied into the recommendation. However, the maintenance options are still offered here for those purchases where the maintenance settings were not completed in the purchase properties. Any change you make in this panel will be written into the license record (in the Support upgrades until a set date field in the Upgrade rights section of the Use rights & rules tab), replacing any information available from the purchase(s), while the purchase records themselves are left unchanged.
6. From the Maintenance type drop-down list, choose one of:
   • Contract when the purchase is covered by an existing contract. Then choose to Use settings from either a recommended contract (choose one from the list of recommendations displayed), or an existing contract (search), and use the search controls as usual.
   • Fixed when a fixed period of maintenance is included in this purchase. The system proposes an end date for the fixed maintenance period by inferring a start date and adding a proposed duration. The start date (not displayed here) is taken from the first available of:
     • Maintenance Effective date on the General tab of the purchase properties
     • The Invoice date on the Financial tab of the purchase properties
     • The Purchase date on the General tab of the purchase properties.
     (In each of the above cases, if you are processing multiple purchases and the first available property is the same on multiple of those purchases, the latest date is the one used.) Given a start date, the suggested end date is calculated by the first available of these methods:
     • If an Expiry date is shown in Maintenance section of the General tab of the purchase properties, this date is used as the end date
     • If a recognized SKU is attached to the purchase, and the standard SKU definition includes a maintenance period, then this period is added to the start date to give an end date
     • One year is added to the start date to give the end date.
     You may use the date picker to set a different expiry date in the Until field, but should do so with care!
     Warning: This control adjusts only the end date of the maintenance period, and does not adjust its start date. This means, for example, that if you move an end date forward by three months, you are effectively converting a 12-month maintenance purchase to 15 months. A safer path forward is to edit the purchase properties outside the wizard to ensure that the Effective date and Expiry date for maintenance are defining the correct period for the maintenance purchase. Once the purchase is linked to the appropriate license, edits to these dates automatically update the license use rights.
     If the destination license is linked to a product for which the Application Recognition Library defines multiple versions, another control appears for To version. If the maintenance ends after a particular release, pick the last covered version from this drop-down list, and make sure that the associated check box is selected.
     Tip: You cannot process the purchase with Fixed maintenance until at least one check box is set for Until or To version. (When only the Until control is visible, ensure that the check box remains selected.)
   • Unlimited, which, although unusual, means there is no end date for the maintenance. The start date (not displayed) is determined by the same process as for Fixed, described above; but no end date is set.
7. Process the recommendation as you have amended it.

The wizard area closes. For purchases where the entire Effective quantity has now been assigned, the processed purchase has disappeared from the Unprocessed Purchases page (it has moved to the Processed Purchases page). If the purchase still has some entitlements to process (for example, part way through splitting it across multiple licenses), it remains in the Unprocessed Purchases page, displaying the remaining quantity of entitlements in the Available quantity field.