Set up module licensing
The Customer Portal holds the number of licenses a customer has bought; NP Retail asks the portal for its share and enforces that limit on its users.
Today only POS licenses are enforced. KDS (Kitchen Display System) and Scanner are part of the same design but have no enforcement yet.
Enforcement also only applies to production BC environments in the cloud — sandboxes and on-premises installs are never restricted, whatever the toggle says.
What the BC app offers
- A feature toggle for licensing, on the NaviPartner Feature Management page. The row is captioned Module Licensing (POS, KDS, Scanner), and the setting applies to the company you are in.
- A small licensing area for checking the current state: NPR Licensed Users lists the users taking up a seat. The NPR License Pools and NPR License Statistics factboxes on that page show what the portal has granted and how many seats are used. They only appear next to NPR Licensed Users, so searching for them by name finds nothing.
NPR Licensed Users looks roughly like this:
Only Active users can use POS. Pending means the line exists but no seat is taken yet, Disabled Manually means an administrator switched the user off, and Suspended Automatically means there were more active users than seats — for example after a quota was lowered. Automatically suspended users come back on their own once there are seats free again.
Nothing else has to be entered in BC — no keys, no tenant or environment IDs. The app identifies itself to the portal automatically.
Set it up
License quotas are set per BC environment in the portal, while the toggle is set per company in BC (an environment holds one or more companies). Most tenants only have one production environment, so in practice this feels like managing licenses per tenant — the whole pool applies automatically, and there’s nothing to split. Splitting only matters once a tenant has two or more production environments; see Customer Portal overview for that case.
Only the toggle is per company. NPR Licensed Users and the seat counts are shared by all companies in the same environment, so each user is activated once for the whole environment.
Set up the portal side first. BC never guesses a number: if the customer has no POS licenses recorded in the portal — or the tenant has two or more production environments and one of them has no quota — that environment gets 0 seats and its POS users are locked out.
The toggle takes effect the next time a user starts a POS session, for every user in that company. Someone already working in POS keeps going until they sign out and start a new session. Brand-new companies with no POS history enable it automatically on install — so even their very first POS user needs an Active license on NPR Licensed Users before they can start a POS session; nothing is activated automatically, not even for that first user.
If a company already uses POS and you’re enabling this for the first time, activate all of its current users on NPR Licensed Users before ticking the feature. Otherwise every one of them is blocked with “You are not a licensed POS user” at their next POS session — an easy way to cause an unexpected outage.
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In the Customer Portal, check that the customer’s POS licenses are recorded, and — only if the tenant has two or more production environments — set the POS license quota for each of them. See Customer Portal overview for how. A tenant with a single production environment has nothing to set here.
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In Business Central, open NPR Licensed Users and add a line for every user who needs POS:
- Choose New.
- Set Module to POS.
- Pick the user.
- Pick the License Term the customer has bought — 1 Month or 1 Year.
- Choose Activate License, which moves the line from Pending to Active.
Seats are counted per module and term, so a term the customer hasn’t bought has no seats: BC then says “Not enough licenses to activate this user” and shows how many are purchased. Deactivate License is the way back, and leaves the line as Disabled Manually.
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In Business Central, turn the feature on:
- Search for NaviPartner Feature Management and select the related link.
- Place a checkmark in the Enabled field on the Module Licensing (POS, KDS, Scanner) line.
- Repeat in every company that should enforce licenses.
If the portal can’t be reached, BC refuses to enable the feature and asks you to try again — check that the portal is up, then retry.
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Check the result on NPR Licensed Users:
- Choose Refresh from Portal to pull the current numbers.
- Review the seat counts in the NPR License Statistics factbox.
Use the same action after changing a quota in the portal.
New companies get the feature switched on automatically, unless POS activity has already been recorded in them — for example, a company copied from a template that has POS history. Companies upgraded from an older version always need it switched on by hand; the upgrade itself never enables it.
Turning it off again
The same row can be unticked at any time, per company, also after licensing has been in use. BC asks you to confirm first, and the change is logged. This is a temporary option for the initial ramp-up period, so that a company can keep selling while its license setup is being sorted out — not a permanent way to run without licensing.