How to Assign Licenses?

Technically, you don’t need to assign the licenses manually. The app itself automatically assigns licenses.

Shared Contacts for Gmail™ designates one license per account you share the labels with. 

Let’s take a look at this scenario.

John is the account admin. He bought five (5) licenses. Then, he shares the labels with four of his colleagues: Jake, Alice, Sofie, and Kate. 

The app counts this as having five (5) used licenses. License number 1 is of course assigned to John. Consequently, license number 2 is assigned to the first person John shared the contact with, let’s say, Jake. License numbers 3, 4, and 5 go to Alice, Sofie, and Kate respectively.

Again, the admin or even the end users don’t need to do anything from the “Users & Licenses” tab of the app.

Case No. 1: Another person needs to access the shared contacts. 

Suppose that John needed to share the label with a new employee, Liam. For this scenario, John then needs to buy an additional license. 

Only the account administrator can buy additional licenses. He can do so by clicking on the “Buy Licenses” on the “Users & Licenses” page. 

Case No. 2: One person leaves the group.

For example, Kate is leaving the company. In this case, John the admin simply needs to unshare the label with Kate. This would automatically free up a license that would be available to the replacement user.

Read: How to Liberate Licenses for Departed Users

Case No. 3: One person leaves but with a replacement already.


In a different scenario, Kate leaves the company and Liam replaces her. In this case, John just needs to “unshare” the contacts to Kate first.

Read: How to Unshare Contacts That You Have Shared With Others

After doing so, license number 5 is left unused until John assigns it to Liam, simply by clicking the “share” icon on the contact list.

Case No. 4: Only one person leaves but the labels needs to be shared with two accounts.

First, John, the admin needs to unshare the label with the user who would no longer be part of the group. The procedure is similar to Case No. 2. He is freeing up license number 5.

Next, he has to buy one additional license. That would be license number 6. Now, there are two licenses available. He can now share labels for the new employees.

More Information Regarding the “Users & Licenses” Page

Through this page, the admin can easily revoke access to all the labels shared with an account. This is especially useful when an employee leaves the company. Furthermore, the admin can also view this page to review all the labels shared with users.

On the other hand, the admin does not need this page to assign licenses. As mentioned earlier, licenses are automatically assigned. One license is, used by each account that accepts a shared label.