The agreements module permits recording of all kinds of different agreements between your company and your partners.
Apart from creating a central record of all agreements, the agreements module particularly supports features for post delivery maintenance activities via the service work order module and periodic invoicing.
- When a sales order is linked to an agreement, and that sales order contains products which have serial number tracking, then when the product is shipped, the serial number will be linked to the agreement and visible under the products tab. So this connection is between Product Tracking and agreements. See more in the Product Tracking menu.
- Agreements can contain price information for service work orders. When a service work order is marked against an agreement and has some items to be invoiced, the prices of these items will be read from the agreement form in priority over sales prices lists.
- Periodic invoices can be created against an agreement. Periodic invoices are not related to any orders or shipments, but are sales invoices that are created according to a time period.
- Agreements have version control (Activate and New version) and can be reported.
Creating an agreement
On the agreement selector press the New button or on an existing agreement, press the New button.
Agreement status
An agreement can have the following status:
| Under construction | New agreement before it is activated, or after a new version has been made. |
| Active | Active agreement. To activate an agreement, the customer, valid from, valid to date, agreement type and price list must be specified. When activating an agreement there will be a warning if there are no products listed in the product tabs, but this data is optional. |
| Cancelled | An agreement has been cancelled by pressing the Cancel button |
| Expired | The agreement has passed its valid to date and the user has pressed the Expire button. |
An agreement can be deleted only if it is Under construction and it has not been previously Active. Instead of deleting an agreement, cancel it if it has been Active.
Products
This is the list of products associated with this agreement. The products are particularly serial number products as listed in the Product Tracking module.
Products will be listed here if they have been sold on a sales order that is linked to this agreement and the product has serial numbering enabled. The product tracking record can be created during the production work order or during the shipment process depending on when the serial number is allocated to the product.
Price
An item’s price can be defined on this tab. When a service work order completed and there are items to be invoiced, prices are applied in following order:
- Price specified on the agreement price tab.
- Price list specified on the service work order
- The price list set as default set in company settings.
Periodic invoices
Periodic invoicing is used to control invoicing which is on a periodic, rather than sales order basis.
It can be used for such things as monthly rental or support agreements. Periodic invoice are created from the main Invoicing section. They have the item information specified together with details of the recurring period. When a period becomes valid then the line will appear in the invoice queue in exactly the same way as a sales order dispatch. It will then be added to an ‘Under Construction’ invoice in the normal way.
On the Invoice lines tab either select an existing periodic invoice or press the New button to create a new periodic invoice line. The details are edited on the line details sub tab.
Fields are as follows:
| Invoice Company | select the relevant company using the action button [...] |
| Item | Optionally specify an item |
| Quantity | |
| Price | |
| Currency | |
| Discount(%) | |
| Sales account | Sales account for this line. The default tax code from this account will be used on the invoice line |
| VAT Payable account | Default VAT account if applicable |
| Cost Centre | |
| Start Date | Start of recurring periods |
| Finish date | Finish of recurrence. Leave blank if this item recurs until further notice |
| Invoice Frequency | Day, Month, Quarter, 6months or Year. Specifies how often an invoice will be generated |
| Multiple | How many of the invoice frequency to include. For instance if the customer should be invoiced weekly, specify day in the frequency field and 7 in the multiple field. |
| Status | Active or Inactive |
| Invoice Date | Shows the date this line was last invoiced |
| Description in invoice. | This description will appear in the description on the invoice line. In addition text will be added to indicate the relevant dates of the period |
| Internal comment | For internal use. |
The ‘Invoiced’ tab show in which invoices this recurring line has already been included.
Standard text
There are two standard text fields for an agreement. Note that the standard text feature works slightly different on agreement compared to other parts of the system. An agreement, standard text is imported to the agreement as opposed to just being linked. This means that the text can be edited specifically to the needs of this agreement after it has been imported.
Custom fields
It is possible to have custom fields for an agreement. These fields must be created by the service provider. Normally custom fields will also be implemented on custom reports.
History
The history tab contains 3 sub tabs:
| Invoicing | Sales invoices linked to this agreement. |
| Sales order lines | List of sales order lines on sales orders that are linked to this agreement |
| Work orders | Lists service work orders that have been linked to this agreement |
Activities
PRM activities can be linked to an agreement. See the section on PRM for further details on activities.