1. Order Management
  2. Sales Orders and Cash Sales
  3. Software Vertical Contract Renewals
  4. Contract Creation Process
  5. Creating a New Contract

Creating a New Contract

With Software Vertical Contract Renewals SuiteApp, contracts and their contract items are generated from sales transactions: opportunities, estimates, and sales orders. Opportunities and estimates must be converted to a sales order before a contract record can be generated. Contracts are created from sales orders using the Sales Order – Contract Renewals form or any customized version of this form.

You can choose when a contract record will be generated from a sales order in the Sales Order Status to Create Contract field on the Contract Renewals Preferences page. For more information, see Setting Up Contract Renewals Preferences.

Note:

Contracts and contract items cannot be created manually, but you can import contracts using CSV import. For more information, see Importing Contracts.

To create new contract from a sales order:

  1. Go to Transactions > Sales > Enter Sales Order.

  2. In the Custom Form field, select Sales Order -Contract Renewals.

  3. In the End User field, select a customer. If necessary, on the Channel subtab, define who this end user is relative to the customer in the Bill To Customer field.

  4. In the Contract Term field, enter the number of months this contract runs. You can enter decimal numbers if you need to represent a term in days.

  5. In the Start Date field, enter the start date for this contract. The end date is calculated automatically based on the contract term and start date values. For information about contract term, see Contract Term Calculation.

    Note:

    By default, transactions created from an opportunity do not have a start date. You must manually enter the start date for these transaction records.

  6. Enter values in the other fields on the transaction header as you would in a standard sales order. For more information, see Creating Sales Orders.

  7. On the Items subtab:

    1. If this is an order for a new contract, leave the Contract field blank.

      If this is an upsell order for an existing contract, select a contract in the Contract field. For more information, see Contract Upsell.

    2. In the Item column, select items that you want to include in the contract. If you are creating a sales order from an estimate or opportunity, the items are populated from that transaction.

      If you want to apply a percentage uplift for a renewable item, enter the value in the Contract Item Uplift column. For more information, see Contract Item Uplift.

      Note:

      You may need to edit these items to ensure that the dates are set properly. The start and end dates for each item are populated from the transaction body. You can change these dates for items that do not apply to the full contract term.

      Note:

      If the sales order status is Pending Fulfillment, you will not be able to edit the line item dates after adding the item. Also, after adding the first line item, the start date column will be grayed out for succeeding line items. If you want to be able to modify the dates for each line item, change the status of the sales order to Pending Approval.

      Important:

      Items that do not co-terminate with the end of the contract are not renewed even if they are set up to be renewable.

  8. If you want to set a custom price for any of the item, click the Options & Log subtab and set the following fields:

    • Block Custom Price Level – Default value is Yes. Set this field to No if you want to enable setting a custom price level for items in this transaction. This setting overrides the settings you made in the Item Category =For Custom Price Block preference on the Contract Renewals Preferences page, which blocks custom pricing for specific item categories. This setting applies only to non-maintenance/support items.

    • Allow Custom Price Level for M/S Items – Default value is No. Set this field to Yes if you want to enable setting a custom price level for maintenance and support items in this transaction. This setting overrides the settings you made in the Item Category =For Custom Price Block preference on the Contract Renewals Preferences page, which blocks custom pricing for specific item categories.

    • Custom Price Entered is Annual Rate – Check this box if you want to enter custom price level list rates as annual rates. This setting enables you to enter annual rates in the List Rate column for items with custom price level, to ensure proper calculation of the amount. In the end, the list rate will be divided by 12 months and stored as a monthly rate.

  9. Click Save.

The value in the Sales Order Status to Create Contract preference determines when a new contract is generated for a sales order based on its status.

When a contract is saved or approved (depending on the preference set), a user event script saves the transaction record and creates a contract in the background. After the contract is created, the user event script triggers a workflow action that attaches the contract record to the sales order.

To improve performance, the contract creation user event script does not wait for the workflow action to finish attaching the contract to the sales order. For this reason, there may be instances when the Contract field on the Items subtab displays an incomplete contract ID and the Check Log Status field on the Options & Log subtab is empty after a sales order is saved.

To check if the workflow action has successfully attached the contract to the sales order, refresh the Sales Order page and check if the Contract field is displaying the complete contract ID and the value in the Check Log Status field on the Options & Log subtab is Pending.

Contracts are given an ID in the following format: ID_<Start Date>_<End Date>. Click the link in the Contract field on the sales order to go to the contract record.

Guidelines for Creating New Contracts

On-Demand Create Contract Items

You can create contract items on demand by clicking the Create Contract Items button on the contract record. This button is available for contracts that satisfy the following conditions:

To create contract items for a contract:

  1. Go to Contract Renewals > View Records > Contracts.

  2. Click the View link next to the contract that you want to create contract items for.

  3. Click the Create Contract Items button.

A confirmation message is shown at the top of the contract record to confirm the creation of contract items. If contract items are successfully created, the status of the contract changes to Active and the Check Log Status field on the Options & Log subtab of the originating transaction is set to Processed.

The SuiteApp implements a validation logic to prevent contract items from being processed simultaneously, which may result to duplicate contract items on contracts. An error message is shown at the top of the contract record if you click the Create Contract Items button when an instance of the contract items script (R03) is already running.

Related Topics

General Notices