Creating a contract

Enter a descriptive contract name. You may have multiple contracts set up for a customer, and the name should make it easy to select the right contract. If you copy the same contract to many organizations, make the organization name part of the contract name.

NOTE  Before you click the icon, enter the first few letters of the organization name to narrow your search.

Once created, the contract cannot be transferred to another organization. If you created the contract for the wrong organization, use the Copy Contract Wizard. Refer to Copying an existing contract.

Optionally, select an individual as the contact for this contract. The drop-down list contains all active contacts associated with the selected organization.

• If the organization has more than 50 active contacts, a data selector field replaces the drop-down list.
  
• If the organization is a sub-organization of another organization, you can select a contact from the list of parent organization contacts that appear below a dashed line.
  

The Period Type field appears on entities where you can set the time increment between payments. It determines the billing frequency. On recurring service contracts only, select from: Monthly (default), Quarterly, Semi-Annual, and Yearly.

IMPORTANT  You will not be able to change the Contract Period Type after you save the contract.

Enter the first day of the date range when the entity is active or valid. It will default to today's date but can be modified.

Contracts

The start date of the contract becomes the billing date for all items billed under the contract.

EXAMPLE  If the Start Date is the 21st of the month, billing for all contract billing items will recur on the 21st. If you want your billing date to fall on the beginning or end of the month, but pro-rate services for the remainder of the current month, refer to Billing for a partial first month.

NOTE  If the Start Date is on a date not in the current period (for example, the start date is on the 31st and the next month only has 30 days), the last day of the month will be used for the billing event.

IMPORTANT  You cannot edit the Start Date for a recurring service contract once the service/bundle period has been added and the contract has been saved.

Opportunities

Start date is used to calculate the number of days the opportunity is in the pipeline.

Projects

The start date for all phases, tasks, and issues must be >= Start Date.

Billing Rules

The start date is the start of the first billing period and the first billing date. It also sets the schedule for all following billing dates. It must be greater than or equal to the contract start date.

EXAMPLE  If the start date is January 3, the next billing date will be February 3. If you enter a date of day #29, 30, or 31, and a month does not have that many days, the start date of that period will be the last day of the month. If you enter a day that is the last day of that month, we will use the last day of every month following that month.

Each period's charge is created using the most recent unit count, which is established by the date entered into the Determine Units/Create Charges on: field. The count date can be the same date as the billing date, or an earlier date.

If there is no unit count on the start date of the first billing period (because the day number selected to determine the unit count is greater than the day number of the start date), Autotask will do a unit count when the rule gets created to use for that first billing period.

If the end date is not the planned last day of a billing period (you have a partial last month), the charge for the last billing period will be prorated.

NOTE  When you create, edit, copy, or renew a recurring contract, the contract length cannot be more than 20 years.

You must set the duration of the contract by choosing On selected date and setting a date, or choosing On # occurrences and specifying a number of occurrences (how many contract periods should occur before the contract ends). When selecting On # occurrences, the contract end date is calculated by multiplying the length of the contract periods by the number of occurrences. The last period's end date becomes the contract's end date as well.

The contract end date controls when the last billing event happens. If you extend the contract, additional recurring service billing items are created, if you shorten the contract, already created billing items will be deleted.

If you extend the contract and the billing date for the first month's extension has already passed, no billing item will be created for that month. Only items for months that are to come are created.

Every customer can have a designated default contract that will automatically applied to all tickets created for the organization within the contract date range.

• You can change the default contract when creating or editing a ticket. Users with the required permissions can change the default contract on time entries, as well.
• If the organization is a parent organization, this contract becomes the default contract for all sub-organizations without their own default contracts.
• If your administrator has enabled the Use default service desk contract for all Client Portal tickets system setting, this contract is also automatically applied to any incoming Client Portal tickets.

Select the check box to make this contract the default. If the organization already has a default contract with an overlapping time frame, click OK to make the new contract the default, or click Cancel. The new contract will become the default for all new tickets.

NOTE  The check box is disabled for Recurring Contracts if another default contract for this organization already exists.

The Description field appears on many Autotask entities. On entities like ticket, task, note, and to-do, the Description field is a core part of the data record. Wherever it is available, it tracks essential information about the record. This field is often prefaced with the entity name. For example, Quote Description.

Enter a detailed description of the entity instance, the issue with which the customer needs help, or the service that they requested.

The contract type is selected when the contract is created, and cannot be edited. On all entities it appears, it is view-only.

Contract types are used to support different billing needs. Options are Block Hour, Fixed Price, Per Ticket, Recurring Service, Retainer, and Time & Materials.

For examples of when to use each contract type, refer to Business cases and contract types.

Contract categories are completely customizable, and their use is optional. They are used for displaying, filtering, and grouping in LiveReports, and filtering on the Items to Invoice page. Refer to Contract categories.

Line of Business lets you classify finances and segment data. This field is displayed when Organizational Structure (Line of Business) is activated and enabled. It is available on the following entities: Contract, Opportunity, Sales Order, Project, and Ticket. Refer to Introduction to Line of Business.

If a contract is associated with a different line of business than the ticket or project, billing items always inherit the line of business from the contract, not the parent entity. Refer to Line of business inheritance rules for dependent entities.

Select a pairing of Business Division > Line of Business.

Click the dropdown control and select a service level agreement (SLA). The selected SLA will be the default for all projects and tickets associated with the contract. For more information on SLAs, refer to Introduction to service level management and Applying service level agreements.

NOTE  You can edit an individual ticket if you do not want to apply the contract SLA to that ticket.

NOTE  The SLA will not be applied to tickets created under the contract before the SLA was added to the contract.

This field is optional and can be edited. It is available on multiple entities and can provide a cross-reference to an external numbering system.

An opportunity is a potential sale you have identified. This field appears on entities that are associated with a sales opportunity. Depending on permissions, the opportunity name or a link to the opportunity is displayed.

Select an opportunity or click the plus icon to add a new opportunity. You must select an organization first. All active opportunities associated with an organization are available.

CRM notes and To-Dos:

CRM notes and to-dos created from the organization or contact entity can optionally reference an active opportunity for the organization. When you add a note from the Opportunity page, the Opportunity Name field is defaulted in.

Contracts:

If the contract is created while running the Won Opportunity or the Won Quote wizards, the opportunity is referenced here.

Projects:

You can associate an opportunity with the project and do the following:

• If this is a proposal project, convert the proposal into a project while running the Won Opportunity Wizard. Quoted charges will become project charges. The opportunity's Total Revenue and Total Cost forecast will populate the project's Estimated Revenue/Cost fields (if these fields do not contain any values). Refer to Closing opportunities you have won.
• Use the linked opportunity's user-defined fields to update the project's user-defined fields. Refer to Copy opportunity UDFs to project UDFs.
• When the project is completed, you can update the opportunity to Implemented from the Complete Project wizard. Refer to Completing a project.

Quotes:

Select an active opportunity, create a new opportunity, or allow the opportunity to be automatically created. If the opportunity is created automatically, it will have the same name as the quote, and the remaining fields will default to the values described in Default values for auto-created opportunities.

Sales orders:

If Procurement is enabled, sales orders are automatically generated from opportunities when the Won Opportunity wizard is run. The field is read-only.

Tickets:

An opportunity will appear in this field if the Won Opportunity wizard was run and Associate this ticket with this opportunity was selected, creating this ticket in the Post Sale queue.

The contract status determines whether a contract is active.

• Contracts are created with the status set to Active.

• You inactivate them on the Edit Contract page. Inactive contracts cannot be associated with new tickets or projects, but billing events will continue until the contract End Date is reached.
  

IMPORTANT  To stop billing for future services, you must change the contract's end date to the date of the last billing event.

This field determines whether you approve and post labor manually, on timesheet approval, or immediately on time entry.

NOTE  Only the Manually option will allow you to go through a separate billing approval stage for labor, correct mistakes, make adjustments, add missing information, correct spelling, etc. We therefore strongly recommend that customers use the Manually option.

This field cannot be edited for per ticket contracts. The Billing Setting for per ticket contract labor is always Manually. This billing setting allows all time entries to remain in Approve & Post until the ticket status is set to complete, ensuring that the ticket purchase remains available until all ticket work is completed.

Refer to Billing settings for approving labor.

Select the check box to change the time entry method for projects that use this contract from decimal time (flat number of hours) to Start/Stop time entry.

• Tickets use Start/Stop time entry by default, so this setting has no impact on them.
  
• Decimal time, the default for projects, tracks time by hours and fractions of hours, for example 1.5 hours.
• Start/Stop time prompts resources to enter the time that they began and stopped working on a task, for example, Start 8:30 AM - Stop 10:05.

The amount of revenue you expect to generate. We strongly recommend that you populate this field, because many reports compare estimated revenue, actual revenue and costs. If you leave this field set to 0.00, these report will not generate useful information.

The amount you expect the contract work or project charges to cost. If you do not have permission to view internal cost data, this field is not visible.

NOTE  If you import quoted product charges from QuoteWerks, the quoted amount will be imported into this field.

The number of hours you estimate it will take to complete the work.

Project Tasks:

Estimated (h) and another field, Per Resource (h), are interdependent.

• If you select Fixed Work, the Estimated (h) field is enabled and the Per Resource (h) field is calculated
• If you select Fixed Duration, the Per Resource (h) field is enabled and the Estimated (h) field is calculated

NOTE  Estimated hours on tickets and tasks populate the Workload Availability report.

Phases:

The total estimated hours specified for all tasks in the phase.

This field is disabled if the Setup Fee field is set to 0 or is left blank.

This is a recurring contract service code used to charge tax on the contract setup fee. Make sure this billing code is associated with the correct tax category. Refer to Tax categories.

NOTE   If the contract organization is tax exempt or the selected code is not associated with a tax category, no tax will be charged.

NOTE   On the Edit Contract page, this field will become read-only once the fee has been approved and posted.

Select this check box to enable the Overage Billing Rate field.

On Block Hours contracts, this hourly rate will be used when all available block hours have been consumed. If enabled, this field is required and will always create a contract charge of 0.00, or the amount entered.

NOTE  If you would like to cap charges for a block period, enter an overage rate of 0.00 . Once the block hours are consumed, labor will be performed at the 0.00 overage rate.

On Per Ticket contracts, this rate will be used as the flat fee contract charge once all ticket purchases have been consumed. This field is required and will always create a contract charge of 0.00, or the amount entered.

NOTE  If you do not add any purchases to the contract, you can use the overage rate to create one-off tickets to bill the customer.

If you have received a deposit, up-front payment, or down payment, enter the amount of the payment. Autotask will create a milestone and mark it as approved, posted, and invoiced.

NOTE  The Posted Date and Invoiced Date for the initial contract payment for Amount Already Received will be the contract Create Date, not the Contract Start Date!
For instance, if a contract is created on 8/25, but the start date of the contract is 8/1, then the milestone created for the Amount Already Received will show a due date of 8/1. However, it will be posted on 8/25 and invoiced for 8/25.

If you have not yet received a payment and your customer needs an invoice for the first payment, enter the payment amount here. The information will appear in Approve & Post and you can generate the invoice inside of Autotask or in your accounting software.

Milestone codes apply billing categories to revenue from Fixed Price Contracts.

Click the dropdown control and select a default Milestone Code for this contract. The selected milestone code is applied to each milestone as it is created, but can be overridden.

The use of Milestone Billing Codes is optional. For additional information on Milestone Billing Codes, refer to Milestone codes.

The Charge tax... check box appears if your instance of Autotask has the Retainer Tax installed module. This module allows you to deduct not only labor and charges from the retainer purchase, but also the taxes applied to them.

The module must be enabled by Datto Support. For details on how this feature works, refer to Adding tax to retainer contract items.

Click to select the check box if you want to deduct tax (for eligible labor, charge, and expense items) from retainer purchases in this contract.

If you would like to send the invoice for billing items generated by this contract to be sent to a third party other than the parent organization for this customer, select it here. Any organization in your Autotask instance can be selected. Revenue and costs are tracked against the organization the contract is set up for, but all approved and posted items for the contract will be invoiced to the billing organization.

Refer to Using contracts to bill another organization.

This role-based notification recipient at the Billing Organization is an individual who can receive workflow rule notifications when automatic repurchase of blocks, retainers, and tickets is enabled.

The exclusion contract is the contract that will be used instead of the current one if the roles, work types, and sub-issues excluded below (and contained in the Exclusion Set, if any) are applied to tickets and ticket time entries. It will automatically substitute for the original contract when a user is saving a time entry with an excluded role, work type, or sub-issue type.

If the exclusion contract has itself an exclusion contract, any roles, work types, and sub-issue types not covered under the exclusion contract will use the exclusion contract of the exclusion contract. The exclusion contract chain is displayed on the Summary page of the contract.

• To select a different contract for the excluded roles, work types, and sub-issue types, click the selector icon to the right of the field and select a contract. All active contracts available for the organization are displayed.
• To not apply any contract, that is, apply default admin settings, leave the field blank.

NOTE  Per-Ticket contracts cannot be selected as exclusion contracts, because they must be applied to the ticket and a time entry for billing to complete properly.

If you accessed the Exclusions page from the contract menu, you can open the selected exclusion contract by clicking the View Contract icon to the right of the field.

An exclusion set is a predefined list of roles, work types, and sub-issues that will not be covered under the current contract. Exclusion sets can be used in multiple contracts. They will increase accuracy and save time.

EXAMPLE  Most of your customers have a Remote Support contract that is the default contract, since initially, you will attempt to solve any issues on the phone or using screen sharing. This contract covers roles such as Support Technician and work types such as Remote Support. All other roles and work types are added to an exclusion set called Not Remote. This ensures that the ticket's or project's contract is not applied to time entries that use the excluded roles and work types. They will use the exclusion contract, or no contract at all.

Click the drop-down menu and make a selection. All previously created exclusion sets are available. Refer to Managing contract exclusion sets. To create a new exclusion set and apply it to the contract (where available), click the plus sign. The New Contract Exclusion Set page will open. Refer to Adding, editing, or copying a contract exclusion set.

These panes show the roles, work types, and sub-issues that were individually excluded from the contract, either instead of or in addition to the exclusion set. Select and click, or double-click, a role, work type, or sub-issue. This will move it from the Excluded to the Available lists.