Assets & Contracts

[integrityit]

Hi - we are currently evalutating the CommitCRM system - everythings seems pretty good at the moment and most hof our requirements seem to have been addresses. 1 question has come though - and that is to do with Contracts and their relationship with Assets.

We install and support hardware/software installations. We have maintenance/support contracts with our clients. Some clients will have more than 1 contract which could be different levels or types of support, AV licencing etc.. The problem I can see so far is that you can add a contract to a client, give it a start and expiry date. You can also add you list of assets and give them dates as well. However, if you raise a ticket against an asset it doesn't give you the contract information. Also, when you raise a ticket against a contract, when you select the asset it gives you all of the assets assigned to that client rather than the assets are covered by that contract. There seems to be no link.

Please can you let me know if I am missing something obvious here, or if there is a work around or a plan to link the contract with assets.
Thanks
Jon

[Support Team]

Yes, this is correct, you can manage asset expiration dates (for software licenses or hardware warranty) in the asset level, and manage the contracts separately.

If you attempt to select an asset for a ticket when its beyond its expiration date, the system will warn you that this asset is not covered. This way you can avoid providing service for an asset which is not covered. You can also generate asset expiration reports and let your customer know in advance the license/warranty is about to expire.

Service Contracts are not specifically linked to Assets. They help you manage your service agreements with the customer, and you can manage few contracts per customer, for different purposes. For example, you can use a Block of Time Contract that will cover on-site hours and another Block of Time contact that will cover remote support. Now, when fixing an issue related to the Asset you'll need to select which Contract to use - if its on-site then use the Contract that covers on-site support, if you connect remotely to fix the issue then you should use this remote support contract.

The separation between the two provides the power to separate between billing, time spent, part used and assets, while it also lets you track and maintain individual warranties expiration dates for specific Assets (from the customer point of view of expiration date and even track the expiration date you get from your vendor). There are also many scenarios where forcing a link between assets and contracts may not work, such as when performing on site work that involves more than one issue, some of the time spent should be "free"/covered while other time spent shouldn't. With separate contracts and assets you have the flexibility to manage it all. That said, I understand how linking between contracts and assets can be helpful in some cases and we'll look into it further. Keep in mind that that the current tools are quite powerful and let you manage both service agreements and license/warranty expiration efficiently.

You can find more information on managing asset expiration dates under Asset Management guide > Warranty/License Expiration. and about contracts management under Introduction to Billing > Using Contract.

I hope this helps.

Neta

[allenc]

If your processes absoutely force you to match assets with contracts you could use the work around of creating multiple accounts for a customer, each account with just one contract.
Obviously this has downsides such as multiple invoices to the customer, selection of which of the customer's account to open, etc, etc.

[integrityit]

Thanks for the responses - I look further into how this affects us and whether we need the work around.

I guess what I was thinking more of is if you assigned assets to a particular contract then the start/end date would already be completed (as it is controlled by the contract) so that the potential for errors was reduced. We will soon start logging calls by a label number that we have assigned to a product covered by a contract (or not as the case may be) - it would be nice to see the contract info somewhere at this point which applied to that asset - even if it were a note that had been applied to the contract to say that the payment was overdue and they were on stop etc..

[integrityit]

Sorry to labour this point a bit - but the question has also just come regarding renewals. All of our contracts automatically renew unless cancelled. I appreciate that we need this to be a manual procedure and that the way to do it seems to be to copy the contract to a new period. This is fine. However, back on the asset thing again! The same procedure doesn't seem to be available to simply change the contract expiry date of an asset. We may have 200 plus assets under one contract, therefore a simple way of doing this is needed. Please can you let me know how CommitCRM handles this?

Cheers Jon

[Support Team]

Thanks for the additional input. I definitely understand what you need, and I will try to suggest a way to achieve this inRangerMSP.

Each contract in RangerMSP has a "main code" and a "secondary code". When you renew a contract by copying it to the next date range (which can be done via the batch copy wizard by the way), the system keeps the contract code, and increments the secondary code. So if you have a contract code 111, the next date range will be called 111.0001, 111.0002, etc.

This allows you to remember only the main code and always receive the up-to-date contract.

So, what you can do is keep the contract code as part of the Asset (e.g. as part of the asset name/code). In the "New Ticket" window, when you select the asset for the ticket, you will easily see the contract code in the selected asset details. You can then select the relevant contract according to the code from the asset, which will automatically display the contract terms, comments, etc. in the area beneath the contract. Also, you can set the contract as "suspended" (in the contract status field) if you have any issues with this contract, and the system will warn you when selecting it that this is a suspended contract.

When you save the ticket details, you can view the ticket's Asset/Contract tab, which displays all comments and notes for the asset and the contract, so you can see any special problems with the customer.

You can also generate asset reports, and filter them by asset codes/names which contain a specific contract code (from the Expand filter in the Report Generation Window). This way you will see a list of all assets which belong to this contract.

To summarize, This is a work-around in order to create a link between the assets and the contracts. Since the contract main code does not change, you do not need to update this link, and it will keep pointing to the most recent contract by the current date range. Once you will setup the system and make it work I believe you will find it quite powerful.

As said, we do understand how linking between contracts and assets can be helpful in some cases and we'll look into it further. At the moment, I do believe the solution suggested above can work quite nicely for you.

I hope this helps.

Neta

[integrityit]

Hi Neta
that work around will work. We will start doing this and see how we go.

many thanks
Jon