Contracts & Contract Lines in Version 2022_1

What are contracts & contract lines, and how to use them

This guide is about the Contracts and Contract Lines dashboards in Good Sign. After reading this guide, you’ll have a basic understanding of contracts and contract lines, and how to manage them. You’ll also be able to manage object histories.

Required User Rights

To be able to use these operations, you’ll need at least the following user right: 3150 Menu – Contracts.

Contracts Dashboard

A Contract is an object in Good Sign, designed for managing and invoicing service contracts and subscription business models. Contract Lines describe the service products that are included in a contract. A contract may have one or several contract lines.

Each contract line is tied to a product and has parameters. These include: a validity period, a pricing model, billing months, and usage data aggregation controls, which together rule pricing and billing.

Good Sign’s Contract Module provides a hub for managing customer contracts that use standard profiles for typical billing patterns:

• One-time Fee
• Recurring Base Fee
• Usage
• Work Invoicing

The Good Sign’s Contract Module allows the pricing of services with the following common pricing models:

• Unit pricing – the unit price multiplied with quantity
• Tier pricing – a varying unit price that depends on quantity and will change when the next quantity tier is reached
• Volume pricing – the unit price is applied to the entire amount; price is determined from the total volume
• Block pricing – a block price is used for the entire volume within defined limits

All contracts are shown in the Contracts dashboard. By selecting an organization from the Organization Tree, you can filter that individual organization’s contracts into view.

Creating a New Contract

1. Select an Organization, for which to create a contract
2. A new contract can be created in the Contracts dashboard by navigating to the Management drop-down menu (see Figure 2) and selecting New Contract
3. After selecting New Contract, a Contract pop-up window appears where you can input the contract information
4. Contract Status is a mandatory field in the New Contract view. The validity time of the contract is also recommended, though not mandatory. You can find some more pointers in the table below
5. Once you’ve filled in all the required parameters, press Save and close the window

Field	Description
Contract Status	Draft – You are preparing a service offer. The service hasn’t been activated. Active – The customer has signed the agreement. The service is live. Other statuses include Candidate, Inactive, & Terminated.
Contract Subject	A Subject for the contract, visible in the dashboard. Helps to distinguish between contracts. It can be used for example to store some technical contract id or PO number given by the customer.
Contract ID	A unique identifier of the Contract. Good Sign suggests a unique ID automatically
Contract Valid From	Start date of the Contract
Contract Valid To	End date of the Contract
Base fee invoicing months	If base fees are invoiced in advance, select here the months when base fees are invoiced. There is a special tag to be used in Invoice scheduling for utilizing this information to control timing of invoice creation

 

Edit a Contract

1. A Contract can be edited in the Contract dashboard by navigating to the Management drop-down menu (see Figure 2) and selecting Edit
2. After selecting Edit, a pop-up window appears where the desired information can be modified
3. Once you’ve changed all the needed parameters, press Save and close the window

Contract Lines Dashboard

All contract lines are shown in the Contract Lines dashboard. By selecting desired level from the organization tree, you can look at contract lines for that branch and below - naturally selecting single organization shows contract lines of that customer.

New Contract Line

Contract lines can be seen by selecting Contracts from the top bar and then selecting contract lines from the drop-down menu (as illustrated in the figure below):

New contract lines can be made easily by pressing a contract line of which contract you would like to add a new contract line to and then selecting Management > New Contract Line or by right clicking a contract line and selecting New Contract Line. 

Alternatively, contract lines can be also added from the contracts by going to Contracts > Contracts and then selecting a contract where you want to add the new Contract Line. Then press the New Contract Line icon (square with a plus in the corner) in the Contract Lines section.

Then a pop-up window appears where a profile should be selected: 

The meanings of the profiles are clarified below: 

One-time fee​	Separately agreed one-time fees that are wanted to be shown on the contract.​
Recurring base fee​	Continuous services and subscriptions with a predefined recurring fee. Price may change over time.​
Usage​	Continuous pay-per-use services, where the service fee is determined in arrears for previous calendar month based on actual service usage.​
Work Invoicing	Work hour billing.​

 

After selecting a suitable profile, click Save. After that a new contract line window appears.

Object History

Object History can be seen in the Contract dashboard by navigating to the Management drop-down menu (see Figure 2) and selecting Object history.

1. After selecting Object history, a pop-up window appears.
2. Select Event history from the right bottom corner. After this the Change History pop-up window appears.
3. All the modifications related to the contract can be seen in the Change History view. By using the Search function, you can search for specific modifications, e.g., related to a certain time frame.
4. Once you’re done, press the close button in the right upper corner and close the window.