Annual true up discipline to avoid surprises.

The drift no one notices.

IBM software rarely shrinks. Workloads migrate to bigger hosts, virtual clusters expand, user populations climb, and editions get upgraded for a feature nobody tracked against the license. None of that registers as a problem in the moment. It registers years later, when an audit reconstructs the whole timeline at full-capacity rates. A true up is simply the practice of reconciling that growth every year, on purpose, before it accumulates into a finding.

What a true up covers.

The annual cycle should compare current deployment against entitlement for every metered product, then quantify the gap and decide how to close it. The discipline matters more than the tooling. A loose review that skips the sub-capacity conditions will miss the largest exposure on the estate.

• Core counts and PVU recalculated against what each product actually runs on
• Sub-capacity conditions confirmed: tool deployed, running continuously, reports retained two years
• User and device counts reconciled for RVU and authorized user products
• Bundled entitlements checked so a bundled component is not used beyond its allowed scope

Surprise cost versus planned cost.

The same overage costs very differently depending on when it surfaces. Found in your own annual review, a gap is a line item you plan for: remediate the configuration, retire idle deployments, or true up the entitlement at a renewal you control. Found in an audit, that gap arrives with a lookback that can run two to five years of back-payments at full-capacity rates, with no sub-capacity relief for the periods your tooling was broken. Discipline is what keeps the cost on the left side of that line.

Tie the true up to the renewal.

The strongest version of this practice times the true up ahead of the support and subscription renewal, so any required adjustment is folded into a commercial negotiation rather than a compliance penalty. Buying capacity you actually need, at a renewal where you hold leverage, is a different transaction from settling an audit claim. The true up gives you the numbers early enough to make it the former.

What this means under audit.

An annual true up is the prevention companion to a proactive license position review: the review establishes the baseline, the true up keeps it current. Together they remove the surprise that audits monetize. When IBM does open a review, a client with true up discipline is not reconstructing years of change under deadline, they are confirming a position they refresh every year. That is the cheapest place to fight an audit, which is well before it starts.