Creating a Contract

You can use contracts to manage the amount of hours you spend on a customer. In the contract, define a maximum amount of recordable hours over a defined period for a selected customer and when the hours used approaches the set limit, you will be notified by the method you have chosen.

Go to Settings - Products and Invoicing - Contracts to display the Contracts page.
Click on the New Contract button at the top right of the page.

The New contract page is displayed:

Select/enter the contract details from the following fields/options:

Field/Option	Description
Contract Customer	Select a customer from the list of those available
Contract Title	The name for this contract
Contract Notes	Any notes you may want to add
Block Hours (number of hours added to the contract)
Initial Contract Hours	The basic number of contract hours that can be recorded in the defined period
Renewal interval	If you want the contract to renew when the allocated hours are used up, choose from the following renewal options: Week - On the first working day or every day specified Month - At the beginning of the month, on the first working day, on a specified day or at the end of the month Quarter - At the beginning of January, April, July and October Year - Starting from the selected month Don't repeat - Select this if the contract is not to be renewed once the hours are used up
Renewal Hours	If you have selected a renewal interval you must enter the amount of hours allocated on renewal here.
Keep hours remaining from the previous period	If you select this option, any contract hours remaining at the end of a period will be rolled over to the next period.
Notifications
Notification threshold	The number of hours before the Initial Contract Hours limit when notification will be made. For example, if you enter 2h here, when the customer has less than 2h of contract time left, an email notification will be sent (if configured).
Add new notification	Add the notification actions you want to be carried out when contract hours drop below the Notification threshold. Choose from: Send a user email - Notification email is sent to the defined user Send a staff email - Notification is sent to the defined Staff Agent Auto top-up the contract - Automatically top up the contract by the defined number of hours
Service Items - Additional item costs listed here
Add new service Item	This allows you to add extra cost items (on top of the cost of the actual contract). Click to open dialog and enter Service Item details: Name Frequency - how often this additional cost will be applied Cost - the cost of the item e.g. If the cost of the item is £10, enter 10 in this field. Cost items - If the cost item applies per Registered User, per Asset Site, per Asset or per Asset Type, the cost entered in the Cost field is multiplied by the number of those stored in the system. The Net option allows you to specify a miscellaneous cost e.g. hard drives etc.
Create summary ticket panel - This panel allows you to define the properties of the ticket(s) created for billing the service items in this contract
Collate cost items into a ticket	When cost items should be collated into a ticket for this customer: Week - On the first working day or every day specified Month - At the beginning of the month, on the first working day, on a specified day or at the end of the month Quarter - At the beginning of January, April, July and October Year - Starting from the selected month Don't repeat
Create the ticket in:	The Ticket Queue in which the ticket should be placed. Lists all those available.
Assigned Staff Agent	The Staff Agent assigned to the ticket. Choose from the list of those available.

Click Save. The new contract is listed in the Contracts page.
Click Activate if you want the new contract to take effect immediately.

Once your contract is active, you can view the 'contract status' by clicking on the Current status link: