Ask a district which applications it actually runs and the honest answer is a spreadsheet somebody maintained until they left. Software approval lives in email threads. Data privacy agreements live in a folder nobody can find. When a teacher asks whether a tool is approved, the answer depends on who they ask.
It holds together until it matters: a renewal, a privacy question from a parent, an incident, or a principal asking why three buildings are each paying for the same thing.
Name, vendor, canonical site, category, and status (approved, under review, or declined) so "are we allowed to use this?" has one answer.
The in-house expert who actually knows the tool, and the vendor support contact. The two things a tech needs at 7:45am and can never find.
Signed agreements live on the application record, not in a shared drive. When someone asks whether a DPA exists, the record answers.
Vendor terms get summarised so a lean team can triage what to read closely, rather than reading everything or nothing.
Rollout guides, training videos and how-tos sit next to the app instead of scattered across drives.
Techs, coaches, principals and staff can look up an app themselves. Most "is this approved?" questions stop being tickets.
The consolidation case makes itself. When three buildings are independently paying for tools that do the same job, a catalog is what makes that visible, and that is either a negotiation, a consolidation, or three separate support burdens you stop carrying. In crunch time it does something simpler and more valuable: it lets you tell the whole district what is happening with a piece of software, quickly, from one record.
There is no spend analysis and no usage metering; the catalog tells you what you run and who owns it, not how much each seat is used. That is a deliberate trade: the catalog is readable by all staff, and usage and cost data is not something we want on a page a teacher can open.
Every feature is in every plan, including this one. Set it up yourself in an afternoon, or have us walk you through it.