Licences and billing overview

Licences and billing keeps three things in step: what you buy from your distributors, what your customers actually use in Microsoft 365, and what you charge them on their contracts. Tenvara reads every subscription from your licence sources each night, logs every change, compares the seats against each customer's tenant and keeps the matching recurring lines on the customer's contract up to date.

Where to find it#

Open Sales and billing from the rail and choose Licences, in the Subscriptions group of the sidebar. The page has five tabs:

On the Subscriptions tab, Views has the lists you will use most:

Every list, total and count in the licences area is about current subscriptions: those Active, Suspended, on Trial or Pending at the source. Subscriptions that were cancelled or expired stay out of the way under the Ended view (and Show ended on a customer's licences), each with the day it ended, so a customer with years of history at a distributor still shows only what they have now.

The Needs attention filter counts how many subscriptions fall under each, and the Mapping tab counts the companies and products still to map. The list itself, its views and changing seats are covered in Subscriptions and seat changes.

Each customer's own licences, with billed, cost and margin, are on the customer's Contracts and time tab (under Commercial), and the Microsoft 365 tab (under Cloud) shows how their licences reconcile against the tenant. Home shows a Licences line whenever something needs someone.

You can also reach every licence screen from the command palette: press Cmd+K (or Ctrl+K) and type "licen" to jump to a view, open Licence sources in settings or start a New licence subscription.

How it fits together#

1. Connect a source. An administrator adds Pax8 or Microsoft Partner Center in Settings > Integrations, on the Licence sources tab, or records licences by hand with Manual entry. See Connecting licence sources.
2. Map companies and products. Each company at the distributor is matched to one of your customers, and each product to a catalogue item. Tenvara suggests matches; nothing is billed until a person confirms them once. See Mapping companies and products.
3. Sync. Every source syncs each night and whenever you press Sync now. New subscriptions, seat changes, price changes and cancellations land in the change log. See Sync and the change log.
4. Reconcile. Supplied seats are compared with the seats bought and assigned in the customer's Microsoft 365 tenant, so you can see unused, orphaned and over-assigned licences and what they cost you. See Reconciling against Microsoft 365.
5. Bill. Each mapped subscription is kept as a recurring line on the customer's contract, which then flows into your invoice runs. See Billing licences into contracts.
6. Act on alerts. Failed syncs, commitments about to end, unbilled seats and over-assignment raise alerts that your alert rules can turn into tickets. See Unbilled seats and licence alerts.

Key terms#

Every money figure in the licence screens is a monthly figure, even for annual subscriptions, so you can compare them side by side. The footer of each list adds up the rows you are looking at.

Who can do what#

Licences and billing has its own permission area in Settings > Roles and permissions. By default administrators can manage it, technicians can view it, and read only users cannot see it at all, so you can keep costs and margins away from people who do not need them. Adding, editing, testing and deleting licence sources always needs an administrator.

Licences sit in Sales and billing, which comes with the Tickets module, so they are there from the start. Comparing seats with Microsoft 365 needs the Microsoft 365 module switched on in Settings > Modules.