To help you record contractual relationships with your customers, you can set Contracts on Companies. These Contracts can help to record information, such as contract renewal dates and who the main contact is for the contract. They can have multiple iterations; however, only a single iteration can be active at any one time. You can define your own statuses for Contract iterations and link them through to a standard workflow status.
Prerequisites:
You'll need Contracts enabled in the Settings Centre before you can follow the steps in this article - here's how
Step 1: Create a Contract
To create a Contract, navigate to a Company and click on the plus button in the top right-hand corner. From the drop-down, click on the 'Contract' option and you will then be able to start entering information about your new Contract.
Description: The Description should describe the type of Contract you're setting up for this customer. This will appear on the Contract's page against this Company
Main Contact: This will be the key person at the Company who will deal with the Contract and any further renewal dates.
Customer Reference: If you give the customer a unique reference for the Contract, then you can store this here. You can also search by this Customer Reference within the main Global Search, located in the top right-hand corner of the CRM.
Alternative Reference: You can also search by the Alternative Reference within the main Global Search, so you can use this field to record an additional reference for your CRM users.
Contract Type: This option is a pre-defined drop-down of different Contract types. This can be customised to your types of Contracts. For example, you may have Contract types such as Telephone Support, Maintenance or Online Support.
Contract Status: As mentioned earlier, you can define your own statuses for Contract iterations and link them through to a standard workflow status. A typical status flow could be Draft, and then to Active.
Start Date & Expected End Date: These 2 dates should specify when the Contract should start and end. By recording this information, this can be extremely helpful when running CRM Reports, such as all Contracts ending in the next week.
Once happy with the information entered, click 'Create' and your new Contract will be created.
Step 2: Make your Contract Live
From the Status drop-down, you can then put the Contract to 'Active', once you've had confirmation from the customer that they wish to go ahead with the Contract.
Once you've selected the status of 'Active', you'll only be able to edit the Contract by creating a new draft amendment. The purpose of the draft amendments are to ensure the changes are then recorded against the Contract to show the iteration history. Alternatively, if you needed to completely end the Contract, you can simply click 'Deactivate'.
