Creating an umbrella contract

Once created, the contract cannot be transferred to another organization.

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

• If the organization has more than 50 active contacts, begin typing the name of a contact to narrow down the 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.
  

Contract Name

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.

Start Date

Enter the first day of the date range when the entity is active or valid. It will default to the first day of the following month 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.

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.

Contract Status

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.

Default Service Desk Contract

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

• 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.

Description

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.

Contract Category

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.

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.

Opportunity

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.

External Number

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.

Purchase Order Number

This field appears on entities that are part of the billing workflow, and is applied to labor and charges.

• If you assign a purchase order (PO) number to a quote (on the Terms tab), and then close the associated opportunity using the Won Opportunity Wizard, any charges created using the Won Opportunity Wizard will inherit the PO number.
• If you assign a PO number to a contract, the associated billing items inherit the contract's PO number.
• If you assign a PO number to projects, tickets, or tasks, that PO number will override the associated contract's purchase order number.
• The PO number appears on invoices. A separate invoice is created for each PO number. If an organization has multiple billing items that are assigned to different PO numbers, Autotask will generate multiple invoices for that organization.

Refer to Working with purchase order (PO) numbers.

Enable Overage Billing

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

Overage Billing Rate

On Umbrella 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.

Approve and Post Labor

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.

Refer to Billing settings for approving labor.

Line of Business

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.

Billing Organization

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.

Billing Organization Notification Contact

This role-based notification recipient at the Billing Organization is an individual who can receive workflow rule notifications..

Estimated Revenue

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 reports will not generate useful information.

Estimated Cost

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.