Managing a volume license agreement
Overview
A volume license agreement (VLA) is a legally binding contract that concerns terms and conditions for license purchase and sometimes also software licensing terms. It can have a parent agreement, comprise child agreements, or both. The specific type of each volume license agreement is indicated in the corresponding field. The dialog pages contain attributes of all possible types of the volume license agreement. Most of the attributes can be used or ignored as you deem appropriate depending on the selected type of agreement.
Volume license agreements are located along with the general master contracts under the Master Contracts in the Contracts application.
Navigation groups all master contracts and volume license agreements by their statuses:
- Effective displays contracts whose expiration date is greater than now and status is one of the following: Canceled, Active, Litigated, Pending.
- Expiring displays contracts whose expiration date is either today or within 90 days and status is one of the following: Canceled, Active, Litigated, Pending.
- Open displays contracts with the following statuses: Submitted, Draft, Signed, Approved, Legally Reviewed, Rejected, Postponed, Content Reviewed.
- Historic displays contracts with an expiration date in the past.
How to create a volume license agreement
You can store the essential information of a volume license agreement in the following fields on the General tab:
- Volume License Program. The relevant licensing program.
- Contract Number
- Title
- Closing Date
- Business Partner
- Legal System. Country whose legal system is applicable if parties disagree about the interpretation or fulfillment and want to have recourse to the courts. .
- Place of Jurisdiction. Location of the court that is eligible for any legal intervention from the counterparties. If you select Other, the Other Place of Jurisdiction field becomes editable and you can provide the details.
- Expected Volume. Estimated amount of turnover that will be generated by this agreement during its validity period. The field is not required. However, if it is filled in, its value will be used in the corresponding report as a planned amount in comparison to the actual volume.
- Authorization Number. Your customer number or authorization number that is provided by the licensor.
- Internal Signer
- Internal Contact
- External Contact
In order for the agreement to be valid in terms of contract management processes, you should also fill in the Effective Date and Expiration Date (or select Contact does not expire) on the Period tab.
Renewing expiring volume license agreements
On the Period tab, you can set up automatic renewal for your agreement:
- Select the Renews upon expiration checkbox.
- Specify the Renewal Period and Time Unit.
If you enable automatic renewal, the system will update expiration date information according to the given settings automatically when the current expiration date arrives. In case of the first automatic renewal, the original expiration date will be stored in the corresponding attribute for transparency.
Managing terms of cancellation
Usually contracts may be terminated on request prior to agreed expiration date during a period of time by end of month, end of quarter, end of year, etc. This cancellation term is defined in the By field providing a list of possible values. In case that early termination must not be possible before a certain date, the corresponding day must be set in Not Before.
The period of cancellation is configured by the values of the Period of Notice and Time Unit fields.
Example: If a contract can be cancelled 4 weeks before the end of each quarter, specify 4 as period of notice, weeks as time unit, and End of Quarter in the By field.
The Cancellation Effective On field shows the closest possible date of cancellation taking into account the Not Before value. Based on the closest possible cancellation date and period of cancellation notice, Notice Deadline is calculated. It displays the latest date when you can inform another party of your intent to cancel the contract.
Example: if a contract can be cancelled 5 days before the end of month and today is March 5, the Cancellation Effective Date will be March 31 and the Notice Deadline will be March 26.
Consider enabling the cancellation notification option. This will send an email to the given recipient (and all people in the Reminder Copy list) whenever the next period of notice is due (this date is specified in Notice Deadline). This allows you to review your options whether to terminate the contract or not. Enter a numeric value in Days in Advance to define how many days prior to the notice deadline you want to be reminded.
If current status of an agreement is set to Cancelled, the Canceled On field contains the date of effective termination provided in the Change Status wizard.
Software products and services
You can associate your agreement with software and catalog services on the corresponding pages. Note that a service can be connected with one volume license agreement only.
This relation has neither functional impact nor side-effect. It is for your transparency only.
Contract family and related contracts
The Contract Family tab shows hierarchical relationships of this volume license agreement and its connections to other master contracts if any. Any master contract or volume license agreement (including the legacy types) can be selected here.
The Procurement tab displays contracts and contract items that belong to this agreement and its child agreements. You can also associate your agreement with purchase licenses on Procurement > Licenses.
Saving links to files
The Documentation > Linked Documents tab can store links to digital documents located on a network drive and online. Both a network link and a web link should lead directly to a file and therefore end with an extension (with .txt, .mp3, .jpg, etc.). To be able to add links to network folders, you need to modify your browser settings.