Renewals get attention. True-ups do not.

A renewal is the moment your contract ends and a new one begins. You can negotiate price, scope, and terms. The vendor wants to renew at higher dollars; you want to renew at lower dollars or non-renew. Renewals are levers for cost reduction.

A true-up happens within the contract. The contract was signed assuming a license count or usage volume; if usage has grown beyond that floor, the true-up reconciles your actual consumption against the pre-agreed rate. You owe the vendor for the additional usage. You cannot negotiate the rate; it is locked in. True-ups are exposures to manage.

The four vendors that drive most mid-market true-up exposure:

• Microsoft: Enterprise Agreement true-ups, often annual; M365 / Azure entitlement reconciliation.
• Adobe: VIP and ETLA true-ups, typically annual or quarterly depending on agreement.
• Oracle: ULA reconciliation, license metric audits.
• SAP: Indirect access true-ups, named user reconciliation.

For mid-market companies, true-ups are often the largest unexpected line item of the year. The bill is technically owed; what makes it painful is that it lands without warning. Knowing it is coming 90 days out changes the conversation entirely.

Most enterprise software contracts have non-renewal notice periods of 30, 60, or 90 days. Inside that window you have full leverage:

• Time to gather alternative-vendor quotes for negotiation pressure
• Time to review internal usage data and build a downgrade case
• Time to surface the conversation to executives without rushing
• Time to coordinate with Procurement, Finance, and Legal in advance

After the window closes, the contract auto-renews at the vendor's terms, or the true-up bill lands at full reconciled price. Inside the window, you have options. Outside it, you have an invoice.

StackIQ's 90-day visibility is calibrated to that operational reality. Every renewal and every true-up appears on the calendar 90 days before the deadline, with utilization, overlap, and AI replacement context already attached.

The single most common failure mode in SAM is orphaned ownership. Someone bought a tool three years ago, the auto-renewal notification still goes to their email, but they left the company two reorgs ago. The notification bounces or gets ignored. The contract auto-renews silently.

StackIQ reconciles every contract owner against the current org chart, pulled from your HRIS or SSO. Owners who no longer work at the company get flagged as orphans. Owners who changed teams get re-routed. Each renewal and each true-up arrives on a current human's desk, not a historical one.

Here is a sample 90-day window for a 1,200-FTE mid-market SaaS company. Notice that renewals, true-ups, overlap, and AI replacement candidates all share one screen, ordered by deadline, with ownership and context already resolved.

Seven events in 90 days. Three different action types. Four different owners. One screen. The asset management team that walks into Q2 with this view is in a fundamentally different position than the one that finds out about the Microsoft true-up the day the bill lands.

Every asset management team has a renewal-surprise story. The contract that auto-renewed because the notification went to someone who left the company. The true-up bill that landed at $340k because nobody had reviewed seat utilization in eight months. The acquisition tool that kept billing to a wrong email address for twelve months.

None of these are exotic. They are the predictable consequence of two structural problems. First, renewal and true-up dates are calendar events that depend on people who move. Second, most SAM tools treat the two as separate workflows, even though they need the same data and the same human attention.

StackIQ exists because both of those problems are solvable with one calendar.

Mid-market range / 300 to 1,000 FTE / figures illustrative