Before Chromebooks came into major use, the main licenses that people had to keep track of were those purchased for use by numerous people, such as Office, OS, and other computer programs that were required to be used on the desktops that were in use. Once Chromebooks came into existence, the number of these licenses that needed to be kept track of increased exponentially.
With school districts, businesses, and other entities beginning to heavily rely on Chrome devices, management of the licenses that came along with them started to become a huge task. Why did this become an issue? Chrome has three different licenses available for these devices. These are the Chrome Enterprise Perpetual, Chrome Enterprise Annual, and Chrome Education and Non-Profit. All three of these offer the same features and bonuses; however, there are two different payment types for these. This is what is important to keep track of. The Chrome Perpetual and Chrome Education licenses are both paid for the lifetime of the devices it is purchased for, while the Chrome Annual is paid on a yearly basis. This means that you can choose to end the subscription, or if you forget to pay, the subscription could be canceled.
All three of these licenses allow you to transfer licenses from one device to another as long as the device is of the same model. If you are get a devices that is a different model to replace an existing one that you have, then you will have to get a new license. With all of this transferring and getting new devices and models, it becomes very important to stay on top of not only your fleet, but also the licenses that are attached to them. Using a complete asset management system will help alleviate these pains by taking all the data out of multiple spreadsheets and putting it all in one place.
If you you like more information on asset management, check out this link.