What licensing software should actually do for your team

David Edwards

7 days ago

4 min read

Licensing software is one of those purchases where the hard part isn’t choosing a supplier. It’s working out what you actually need the system to do.

Most teams go through this once every few years, which isn’t often enough to build up a view of what’s standard and what’s genuinely useful.

Here is what we would look at, based on thirty years of working alongside licensing teams and a lot of conversations about what slows them down.

Does it handle both ways of working?

Some councils want to produce their licenses in-house. While some want them produced and posted by someone else. Plenty want both, depending on the product and the time of year.

Software that only supports one model forces a decision you may not want to make. A system worth having lets you place an order for direct delivery to a licence holder, or print the same licence at your own desk, without switching between two different tools and two different sets of data.

MOGO Evolve works either way. Direct Fulfilment orders are produced and shipped by us. Self Service orders print on your own equipment from templates we build and maintain. Same login, same records, and the same reporting.

Can one person process a hundred renewals without doing it a hundred times?

Renewal peaks are the real test. December, January and March tend to be the worst of it for most authorities.

Processing orders individually is fine when three come in. It stops being fine when three hundred do. Bulk upload turns a day of repetitive entry into a few minutes, and it removes the main cause of errors, which is someone typing the same registration number for the fortieth time that morning.

Worth asking any supplier: can I upload a spreadsheet, and what happens when one row in it is wrong?

Does it work when half the team is at home?

Hybrid working impacted a lot of licensing processes, because printing a licence requires being near the printer.

The fix is a print queue. An officer approves a licence from home, it sits in the queue, and whoever is in the office that day prints it. Queues are visible across the team, so one person can run everyone's licences in a single go rather than each officer handling their own.

It sounds like a small feature. For a team of three covering leave, sickness and two offices, it is the difference between cover working and cover not working.

Where do you find out where a delivery is?

Chasing a courier on behalf of a driver is nobody's best use of an afternoon.

Tracking inside the system means the answer is on screen when the driver calls. Through Evolve, courier tracking sits against the order, so you can see what has shipped, what has arrived and what has not, without a phone call or a separate portal.

Can you get the data back out?

Licensing teams get asked for numbers. How many plates issued last quarter. How many badges due for renewal. What we spent, broken down by product.

Reporting that requires a request to the supplier, or an export into a spreadsheet you then have to clean up, is not really reporting. Search any order, filter it, pull a report. That should take seconds.

Who can see what?

Individual logins for every user, with access controlled by role. Shared logins are still surprisingly common in licensing teams, usually because the previous system made individual accounts awkward.

Individual accounts matter for audit as much as security. Knowing who placed an order and when is useful during a complaint, a dispute or an internal review.

What does it need from your IT team?

Ideally nothing.

Evolve runs in a browser. No installation, no local infrastructure, no server to maintain. Templates are configured by our Technical and Development team and tested with your licensing team before go live. Where a council has limited internal IT capacity, we can handle the whole configuration ourselves.

How secure is it?

Worth asking directly, and worth asking for specifics rather than reassurance.

Evolve is hosted on Amazon Web Services and developed by a specialist provider operating an ISO 27001-certified Information Security Management System. Security runs in layers: HTTPS/TLS encryption, role-based access controls, Multi-Factor Authentication, AWS Identity and Access Management, and encryption of databases and backups.

Data retention is configured to your own policies, so records can be deleted or anonymised automatically in line with the periods you have set.

Who picks up the phone?

Support models vary more than anything else on this list.

Evolve is looked after by our own Technical and Development team, so a question about the system goes to the people who built it. No ticket routing to a first-line desk working from a script.