contracts and / or reminders

[natrat]

Is there any way to get reminders or automatic email reports (to act as reminders) for some clients? Related to this question is my confusion about Contracts.

I have clients on managed services, and the home/SOHO plan is basically billed every four months. I want to get a reminder to bill these clients so I don't forget.

Also, i just can't get my head around how to create a contract for these clients. It is a fixed rate, every four months. I don't want jobs billed for these clients to fall under the actual contract, its simply a way to bill them for a monitoring service (ie. theres no included Block of Time or Included Hours). What is the process? I've read through the wiki and tried creating it but i am confused.

my goal is basically to have a reminder to bill these clients on this managed plan every four months and reflect in CommitCRM that they are on this type of plan.

Another thing that throws me with contracts is every contract is unique. I want to create a general contract, ie. SOHO Monitoring at $150 3 times per year, that i can apply to multiple clients. It seems i need to create a unique contract for everyone even though the terms are identical. am i missing something?

help :)

[lpopejoy]

Create a global contract to cover the date range.
Add charges for monitoring under "contract price charges".
Each month, as part of your billing process, go to contracts and do a batch copy for all contracts that expired last month or next month, whatever you prefer.
When the contract renews, it will create a new contract for a date range matching the previous one - the contract price charges will be marked "billable" and you can push them to Quickbooks.
Using a global contract will keep all charges under that contract as billable as well.
...yep, you need to do that for every single client. :)

All the best,
Luke

[nattivillin]

A reminder when contracts are up would help. We created an activity for it, but I don't get any alert. Just a to do item that I never see until after it's expired.

An email reminder would be great.

[natrat]

thanks for the replies. So basically CommitCRM has no way of either a) giving you a reminder about contracts being due or b) auto-renewing contracts? so for every client I need to manually monitor the end period of a contract and manually creat a new contract for the new period? To me that seems to be more work than just forgetting about using contracts for these types of services and putting a reminder in Outlook to create a new charge inCommitCRM. Seems like less work, plus i get a reminder? Am i missing something, as it seems to be a major oversite of Commits contracts system.

[Support Team]

Well, I believe you are missing some options:
(1) RangerMSP does alert you whenever you try to use an expired Contract.
(2) Expired Contracts are listed in when selected.
(3) Contracts can expire not only by date by also by other factors - like - a Block of Time has completely been used.
(4) You can print a powerful report for all your expiring Contracts. It is called: 'Contracts List by Type and Expiration'.
(5) Contracts can easily be renewed on a Single Contract basis.
(6) You can renew 100s of Contracts with just a few clicks using the Batch Contract Renew wizard (learn more.

Hope this helps.
Sheli