User licenses for once-a-year users are free of charge

Description

Many organizations have employees or stakeholders who only access the system once a year. If the organization is charged per user irrespective of usage, it can become a significant financial burden.

Example Use Case

Scenario: A financial institution uses planning software for its annual budgeting process. A substantial number of departmental heads are only required to input their budget forecasts once a year, on a single sheet. It takes them about an hour. For these infrequent users, purchasing a full license seems inefficient and uneconomical.

Solution: The company opts for planning software that provides free licensing for once-a-year users. This facilitates full participation in the budgeting process without incurring unnecessary licensing costs.

Considerations

One goal of implementing a planning tool is to make the planning and forecasting process continuous, meaning that users should be logging in regularly. As a best practice, those department heads should be logging in monthly to view results, re-forecast, and analyze key metrics.

Some organizations such as higher education produce a detailed budget once a year and stick with it no matter what. The same goes for government, and very large enterprises. In that case, it is not palatable to purchase hundreds of users only for them to enter a few fields on a form once a year. Other licensing arrangements should be pursued in that situation, such as a site license, concurrent user license, or consumption license.

Some vendors will suggest that the annual users enter information in a spreadsheet, and then upload those sheets instead of providing logins. This is a terrible idea, as it exposes you to all the negatives of Excel with the addition of data corruption in the system you just paid for.

Questions to Ask a Vendor

• Eligibility Criteria: Who qualifies as a once-a-year user in your licensing model?
• Cost Implications: What is the cost implication if a once-a-year user needs to access the software more regularly?
• License Management: How does the system manage these type of users in practice?