Recurring inspections are the whole business. Stop tracking them in a calendar.
Annual, semi-annual, quarterly: the obligations you are paid for live in a wall calendar and somebody's memory. A missed quarterly is a liability and a lost invoice. A lapsed renewal is a customer you forgot you had.
Where the day goes now
- The semi-annual on a sprinkler system gets missed because it was written on a calendar that got replaced in January.
- A contract renews silently at last year's price because nobody noticed the anniversary, and the increase you needed never happened.
- You cannot say, for one customer, what you are obligated to inspect this year and what it is worth without pulling three folders.
- Taking over a competitor's accounts means re-typing every rate sheet by hand.
What Contracts changes
- The contract carries the schedule. Frequency, inspection or service type, buildings and price in one record; the jobs it owes are generated from it instead of remembered.
- Renewals you can see coming. Each agreement has a reminder window before its end date; auto-renewing agreements renew themselves and the rest raise a notification to the people who need to act.
- Customer Contracts. One customer or national account, every agreement, its state and its covered buildings on one page.
- Import Contract. A rate sheet PDF is read into a draft contract for you to review, instead of being retyped.
Definitions and agreements
A contract is first a definition: the status, tier and renewal type, term dates, payment terms, a not-to-exceed amount, an escalation percentage, the renewal reminder days, and switches for price enforcement, a subscription and a service schedule. Time billing can be set to an increment and a minimum billable period. A definition can be marked as a template and reused.
An agreement is that definition proposed to a customer or a national account, with the buildings it covers. It moves through Proposed, Pending Signature, Accepted, Declined and Cancelled. On acceptance the pricing is frozen in a snapshot, so a later change to the definition never reprices an agreement already in force. Every field change is kept in the contract history.
Pricing inside the agreement
Line items carry the service or inspection type, the pricing type, an amount or rate, an included quantity with an overage price, cost and sell, and whether the line is covered. Lines can be grouped, fees can be tiered, rates can be overridden, adjustments and service exclusions recorded, and clauses attached. When a covered line is billed, the invoice shows it at no charge; a contract-priced line shows the agreed price.
The schedule and the jobs it generates
A service schedule on the contract names an inspection or service type, its frequency, an anchor month and a lead time in days. For every accepted agreement, every schedule and every covered building, the due dates are computed across the term, and each job is created once its due date minus the lead time has arrived. A generated job is created Pending with the due date, the scope of work, the contract number and the schedule occurrence stamped on it, and with the inspection type and frequency or the service type already set. The generator never creates the same occurrence twice, and it can be run for a single agreement from its page.
Subscription invoices
An agreement with a subscription cadence, from monthly through every two years, with a recurring fee and an optional one-time fee, produces one draft invoice per period in the Billing module. The invoice records the contract and the subscription it came from.
Renewal
As an agreement's end date comes within its reminder window, an auto-renew agreement is renewed for another term of the same length with its pricing carried forward, and any other agreement raises a notification to its creator and the operations managers. An agreement can also be renewed or cancelled by hand, and a renewed agreement points back to the one it replaced.
Signature
An agreement is sent for signature by email. The customer opens a link, reads the agreement, signs on screen, and the signature image, the signing address and the viewed and signed times are kept with the agreement; a counter-signature can be added. The agreement PDF is generated from your own Word template.
Import Contract
Upload a rate sheet or agreement PDF and the import reads it into a draft contract definition, with its lines, for you to review and confirm. The import never activates a contract or creates an agreement on its own.
Bottom line
No missed obligations and no silent renewals. One recovered price increase across the book is worth more than the software costs.
Inside this module
- Dashboard
- All Contracts, New Contract, Import Contract
- Customer Contracts