SELA contracts

SELA contracts

A SELA is a paper document. It lists products, quantities and rates, and it names the org each line is provisioned to. What it never tells you is whether any of it is actually being used.

Your org analyses tell you the opposite half of the story: who logs in, which licences are consumed, which profiles hold them — but they know nothing about what you agreed to pay for.

The contracts area exists to close that gap. It puts the paper side of the agreement next to the measured reality of the orgs, line by line, so that "we bought 4 000 of these" and "1 100 people actually use them" finally appear on the same screen — and so that every seat can be traced back to the business unit that should carry its cost.

Contracts live at the folder level, next to the graphs of the orgs they cover: open a folder and use Contract management. A folder usually holds several contracts (the live one, a draft renewal, past terms). Everything is edited in place and saved as you type.

Each contract has three screens: SKUs, Mapping and Business Units — the paper, the bridge, and the cost owner.

1. The paper side — SKUs

The first screen is the agreement as written: one line per contracted product, per org.

Nothing on this screen is derived from an org. It is your side of the negotiation, recorded faithfully — including the awkward parts, like a percentage add-on whose real cost you know but can't recompute.

2. The org record — giving every Org ID a name and a graph

A real SELA is a wall of Org IDs. On its own, an Org ID tells nobody anything.

This is the step that turns the contract from a list of codes into a map of your estate — and it is what makes everything downstream possible: only a reconciled org can be compared against real licence data.

3. Mapping — contracted vs provisioned vs used

This is the heart of it. The Mapping screen is where a paper item meets the licences that actually exist in the orgs.

You don't map raw contract lines. On the SKU list, Map product promotes a product — every line bearing that name, across every org — into a mapped product. Only the products you care about are promoted, so the noise of a 350-line order form doesn't have to be mapped before the screen becomes useful.

For each mapped product, Edit mapping lists every org the product is provisioned to, and you pick one licence per org:

The default view then answers the question the paper never could, one row per org:

Column

What it is

Contracted

what the SELA says you bought

Provisioned

what actually exists in the org

Used

what people actually consume

Utilisation

used ÷ provisioned

Δ vs contract

provisioned minus contracted — over or under your entitlement

Three numbers that live in three different worlds — a signed order form, an org's setup, and its real activity — finally on one line. Shelfware becomes visible. So does the opposite: a product provisioned beyond what was contracted.

4. Business units — who should pay for it

Knowing that 1 100 seats are used doesn't tell you whose they are. The Business Units screen answers that, and turns usage into internal cost.

Membership comes from one CSV that you own — workspaces/<folder>/business-units.csv, two columns, email and unit. That file is the single source of truth: no in-app import, no hidden state to drift out of step with your own HR or finance list. The header is optional, and comma, semicolon and tab separators are detected automatically. Edit the file externally, then click Refresh from CSV. The status strip reports how many rows were read, how many units they describe, how many matched a real user, and how many emails matched nobody.

Only full internal-seat licences are considered (Salesforce, Platform, Platform Login); community logins are out of scope.

The screen is a tree you expand:

A unit's credit is a quota, not a fact: it is compared against what the unit really draws. That comparison — credited versus used, with a backcharge attached — is what makes an internal chargeback defensible.

What you get out of it

To get the most out of it

Published with Nuclino