IT Asset & Licence Register
Keep one register of every device, licence and subscription: who has it, what it cost, when the warranty runs out and when it renews. Keeps one-off purchases and recurring cost apart instead of adding them together. Nothing is uploaded.
Version 1.0.0 · Updated Aug 5, 2026
Overview
How to use IT Asset & Licence Register
The complete in-tool guidance, reproduced here so you can read it before you download.
What this tool does
CM8-119 is a single register of the equipment and software an organisation owns or rents: what it is, who has it, what it cost, when the warranty runs out and when it renews. It is the list an auditor, an insurer or an incoming IT manager asks for on the first day, and the list almost nobody has.
It runs entirely inside this one file. No account, no upload, no network request of any kind. That matters for a register like this: it names staff, records serial numbers, and points at where licence keys are kept.
Two kinds of money
The single most common mistake in an asset register is adding a laptop to a subscription. A laptop bought for 1,200 and a service costing 1,200 a year are not comparable amounts, and their sum is not a number that means anything. This tool refuses to produce that sum.
Every row carries a basis: a one-off purchase, or a recurring cost billed monthly, quarterly or annually. From that one field everything else follows:
- Capital purchase value — the price paid for everything bought outright. A stock figure: what you have spent on things you now own.
- Annual recurring cost — what the subscriptions cost for a year. A flow figure: what leaves the bank again next year whether or not you buy anything.
They are shown as separate tiles, separate columns in the department table, and are never added. Where a chart has to put them side by side, both are first converted to an annual equivalent: a subscription at its yearly cost, a purchase at its price divided by the write-off life you set in Settings. That conversion rests on an assumption, so it is labelled everywhere it appears and the write-off life is yours to change.
The annual equivalent is a management convention, not depreciation. It exists so you can say "this laptop fleet costs us about as much per year as that subscription". It is not a depreciation charge for your accounts, it implies no tax treatment, and your accountant will use different lives and methods.
What goes in the register
One row per thing you would have to account for if it disappeared. In practice:
- Devices — laptops, desktops, phones, tablets, monitors, servers, network equipment. One row each, because they get assigned, repaired and disposed of individually.
- Batches — twelve identical monitors bought on one invoice can be one row with a quantity of twelve, as long as you never need to track them individually. If you do, split them.
- Software bought outright — a perpetual licence is a one-off purchase. Its support and updates cover usually is not; put that expiry in the warranty field.
- Subscriptions and services — anything billed again and again: productivity suites, accounting software, endpoint protection, backup, hosting, line-of-business tools.
Things that do not belong here: consumables, anything under whatever value threshold you set for yourself, and contracts billed by usage — a usage-based bill has no fixed amount to record.
The fields, one by one
Asset tag is the label you can read off the device. A prefix per type and a running number is enough; what matters is that it is consistent, because that is what makes a physical stock check possible. Give software a tag too, so the row can be quoted on a purchase order.
Serial number or licence key reference. Record the serial of hardware; it is what an insurer and the police will ask for. For software, prefer a reference to where the key is kept over the key itself — "licence certificate in the finance safe" is safer than the key in a file that gets emailed around.
Cost is the amount for the whole row for one bill. For a one-off purchase that is the price paid, for the whole quantity. For a subscription it is the amount on one invoice: the monthly figure if it is billed monthly, not the year's total. Getting this wrong by a factor of twelve is the second most common error in these registers.
Seats or quantity is how many devices this row covers, or how many licensed seats you are paying for. Purchase or start date is when it arrived or the subscription began. Status tracks what is happening to it now; disposed records stay in the register for the audit trail but drop out of the cost totals unless you switch them back in from Settings.
Every formula
Nothing here is hidden. These are all the calculations the tool performs.
Age in years = days from the purchase date to today ÷ 365.25
Annual recurring cost = cost per bill × bills per year (monthly × 12, quarterly × 4, annual × 1; a one-off purchase has no annual recurring cost at all)
Cost per seat = cost ÷ seats or quantity (on the same basis as the cost — read it next to the Basis column)
Annual equivalent = annual recurring cost, for a subscription = purchase price ÷ write-off life in years, for a one-off purchase
Days to next date = days from today to the earlier of the renewal date and the warranty or support expiry (negative once it has passed)
Capital purchase value = sum of the price paid for every one-off purchase, disposed records excluded unless you include them
A row with no cost entered contributes nothing to any total. That understates the position quietly, so it is worth putting an approximate figure against inherited kit rather than leaving it blank.
Renewals, warranties and lapses
Two dates drive the warnings. The renewal date is when a subscription or contract comes round again. The warranty or support expiry is when hardware stops being someone else's problem. Either can be set, or both — a perpetual licence with annual support cover uses the warranty field for the support expiry.
The renewal table lists every date in order, oldest first, so anything already expired sits at the top where it cannot be missed. The warning window in Settings decides what counts as "due soon"; sixty days is a sensible default because it is long enough to get a quote, a purchase order and an approval through.
An expired renewal is not just a cost question. If endpoint protection lapsed three weeks ago, the register should tell you that before somebody else does.
The tool sends no reminders. It has no email, no calendar and no notification of any kind. It shows you the dates when you open it. Put the important renewals in a real calendar as well.
Seats, and the licence you pay for twice
Seat counts drift upwards. Somebody leaves, the seat is not released, and the annual renewal quietly carries it for another year. Compare the seats on each subscription row against the headcount that actually needs it, and do it a month before renewal rather than a week after.
Per-seat cost is shown on the entry preview and used in the renewal table so you can compare like with like: two products at 300 a year look identical until one covers five seats and the other twenty-five. The per-seat figure is always on the same basis as the cost you entered — per month for a monthly bill, per year for an annual one.
Age and refresh
Age is worked out from the purchase date and marked against the refresh age in Settings: green while there is life left, amber in the last quarter of it, red at or past it. Licences and subscriptions are never aged, because a four-year-old subscription is not worn out.
Refresh age is a planning number, not a rule. A four-year-old laptop that is fine is fine. What the flag buys you is a budget conversation held twelve months early rather than an emergency purchase the morning a machine dies.
What an auditor asks for
The questions are consistent, and this register answers most of them from one screen: what do you own, where is it, who has it, what did it cost, is it still under warranty, what are you paying for every month, and what happened to the things you no longer have.
That last one is why disposed records stay. A register that only shows current assets cannot explain a gap. Keep the disposed rows, note the disposal method and the date in the notes, and keep any certificate of data destruction with them — for many organisations that certificate matters more than the residual value of the hardware.
What this tool cannot do
It cannot see your network. It does not discover devices, read installed software, count active users or check entitlement. Everything in it is what somebody typed, so a register that is not maintained becomes wrong within months and misleading within a year.
It is not a licence compliance position. Whether you hold enough licences of the right kind for the way you actually use a product is a question about that vendor's terms, and no register can answer it on its own.
It does not price disposal, residual value, insurance, or the labour of running any of this. And it holds one currency at a time — if you buy in more than one, convert before you enter, and note the rate you used.
Printing and sharing
Print Report builds a report from whatever the current filter shows: header, the six headline figures, all four charts, the renewal schedule, the department summary, the full register and your closing notes. Print to PDF to circulate it.
The scope line states the filter in force and the currency. Clear the filters before issuing anything described as the complete register, and check the write-off life in Settings matches what you tell people the annual equivalent means.
Saving your work
Records, settings and the report header are written to this browser's local storage as you type, and the toolbar shows the time of the last save. That storage belongs to one browser on one computer: another browser, a private window, a second machine or a clean-up tool that clears site data will not have it.
Treat Export .json as the real save — one file containing everything, which Import .json restores anywhere. Export CSV gives you the register for spreadsheet work and includes every filtered record, not only those drawn on screen. Reset asks twice, then erases everything this tool has stored. There is no undo.
Because the file can contain staff names, serial numbers and pointers to where licence keys live, treat exports as confidential and store them where the rest of your IT documentation lives.
Accuracy & disclaimer
This tool records what you enter and calculates from it. It cannot tell whether a cost was entered on the right basis, whether a renewal date is still correct, whether a device still exists, or whether a licence is being used — and every figure on the screen depends on those things.
Capitalisation thresholds, depreciation rules, record-retention periods and data-destruction duties differ by country and by organisation. This is an internal record-keeping and cost aid, not accounting advice, not legal advice, and not a substitute for a licence compliance review.