LAW, the License Administration Workbench, is the SAP tool that consolidates the USMM self-measurement results from every SAP system in an estate into one combined report, deduplicating users who hold accounts across systems so that a single person is counted once rather than several times. It is the final step in SAP's annual measurement chain, and the report it produces is what SAP compares against your contracted entitlements to decide whether you are compliant.
What LAW does
A large SAP customer runs many systems, and the same employee often has a user account in several of them. If each system reported its users independently, that one person would be counted multiple times and the bill would be inflated. LAW solves this by collecting each system's USMM output and matching users across systems, then classifying each unique person into a single license type. The consolidated result is transmitted to SAP through the related SLAW process.
| Tool | Scope | Role in measurement |
|---|---|---|
| USMM | One SAP system | Counts named users and engine use per system |
| LAW | Whole estate | Consolidates and deduplicates across systems |
| SLAW | Whole estate | Transmits the consolidated result to SAP |
The classification step is where money is won or lost. LAW carries forward whatever user type each account was assigned in named user licensing, so an employee misclassified as a Professional user in one system stays expensive through consolidation unless the assignment is corrected first.
Where consolidation goes wrong
LAW deduplicates on matching identifiers, usually the user name or an email field. When the same employee holds accounts with different user names across systems, LAW fails to match them and counts the person twice. The reverse also happens, where distinct people share a generic name and get merged incorrectly. Both errors distort the declaration, and the full mechanics of the chain are set out in the USMM, SLAW and LAW guide.
Compliance warning: The LAW report is a self-declaration, and SAP treats it as the starting point for any audit, not the final word. Review the consolidated output before submission. Correct duplicate counts, reclassify over-assigned users down to the lowest valid type, and reconcile the total against your contract. A report submitted without review locks in every misclassification for the year and hands SAP a baseline you will spend the next renewal trying to walk back.
How LAW differs from a formal audit
The LAW report is a self-declaration the customer prepares and submits, while an audit is an examination SAP initiates and controls. The two are connected, because the declaration sets the baseline an audit measures against, but they are not the same event. A customer runs LAW every year as a contractual obligation. An audit happens when SAP chooses, and it can reach beyond the LAW numbers into indirect use, engine metrics, and historical entitlement. Buyers who treat the annual LAW submission as the whole compliance picture are often surprised when an audit looks at exposures the report never covered, such as documents created by external systems. The right posture is to make the LAW declaration accurate and defensible, then prepare separately for the broader questions an audit will ask, since a clean declaration narrows the ground an auditor can contest.
Why it matters to buyers
The LAW report is the single document that most shapes an SAP license audit, because it is the customer's own statement of use. Treating it as a clerical task rather than a negotiation input is the most common and most expensive measurement mistake. The consolidation runs once a year, which means an uncorrected error compounds until the next cycle. Our SAP advisory practice reviews the USMM and LAW output before it reaches SAP, and the wider measurement and audit context sits in the SAP licensing guide.