Managing contract items
What is a contract item
Contract items are components that belong to a contract and define the services or goods that should be delivered within the contract. A contract item can be created and managed only as part of a contract.
Contract items are located in the Contracts application under the Purchase Contracts > All Contract Items navigation item.
Matrix42 Enterprise Service Management has 5 types of contract items with each type designated to represent a certain type of business arrangement:
- General. This is a contract component that does not fall under any other contract item category.
- Leasing. This type is meant to store information about the use of objects or rights without owning them. Set of fields of this contract item are identical to the fields of the general item.
- Purchase. This type of contract items is related to acquisition of objects or rights. It has additional fields where you can enter the warranty information.
- Maintenance. Such a contract item is related to maintenance of software or assets. Maintenance is a modification of a software product or asset to keep it up-to-date and efficient and correct faults. Relevant details you can store on the Support tab.
- Professional Service. Contract items of this type represent the use of services, such as consulting services that are provided by subject-matter experts. Relevant details you can store on the Services tab.
Managing expiration and renewal
You can manage data regarding the period and expiration of contract items on the Period tab.
If an item has an expiration date, you can set up automatic renewal for it:
- 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.
Automatic notifications about the contract item's renewal
For the guideline, please refer to Automatic renewal notifications for purchase contracts.
Setting expiration notifications
For the guideline, please refer to Setting expiration notifications for contracts.
Managing terms of cancellation
Contract items 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 item.
Example: if a contract item can be cancelled 5 days before the end of month and today is March 5, the Cancellation Effective On 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 automatically calculated in Notice Deadline). This allows you to review your options whether to terminate the contract item 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 item is set to Cancelled, the Canceled On field contains the date of effective termination provided in the Change Status wizard.
Setting cancellation notifications
For the guideline, please refer to Setting cancellation notifications for contracts.
Cancelling a contract item
To cancel a contract item, run the Change Status action. When you change the status to Cancelled, the wizard shows the Canceled On field. Use it to enter the date starting from which the contract item is no longer valid. If this date is set in the future, the contract item's status becomes Cancelled until this date is reached. When the date is reached, the contract item becomes Expired.
Calculating procurement profit
The system can calculate and display total, monthly and daily procurement profit. You should fill in Period (Months) or Period (Days) to set a time frame of the profit and then specify the amount of profit in either Total Profit, Monthly Profit or Daily Profit. Other fields will be updated based on the entered values.
Remember to specify Material (type of asset or service delivered within the contract item) to see up-to-date statistics in the Procurement Profit by Material Group report.
Keeping lists of contacts and assets
You can keep an extensive list of contacts that are involved in working on this contract item. Use the Contacts tab to add in-house and external contacts and specify their Role if needed.
On the Assets tab you can add all types of devices from the Assets application as well as licenses to connect them to a contract item.
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.