Entitlement

An entitlement is what the organization has the right to use: the licences it bought, in what quantity, under which metric (per device, per user, per core), with which conditions and until when. It is the contractual half of software asset management. The other half is observation: what discovery actually finds installed and running across the estate.

The distinction is the whole discipline. A scan alone tells you what exists; an entitlement record alone tells you what was bought; only the comparison tells you what matters — installations above entitlement (a compliance exposure that surfaces in a vendor audit as an unbudgeted invoice) and entitlements above use (money already spent on shelfware that the next renewal should recover). Keeping the two as separate, reconciled records — rather than one optimistic spreadsheet — is what turns a licensing audit from an emergency into a report.