Stop block of time warning

We have customer who always go over their initial service plan. Once that happens, all new charges are still booked to the contract so we can keep up with the total hours for a year.

Each time you add a new charge, you get a warning about they being over hours.

How can we disable this?

nattivillin, I believe that I'm not following you here. Can you please elaborate more on why you log Charges under the Contract up-front? and what exactly is happening at the next stage. In short, any time Charge you log under a block of time contract will reduce the block time.

Correct until the block of time left is 0. Then you get a warning saying they are out of time each time you try to create a new charge under a contract with 0 hours left.

This is exactly how a Block of Time Contract works. It alerts you when the block of time has been used. There is not way to suppress these warnings as this is the main idea when using a block. You can switch to another type of Contract if you do not want to get these warnings when the block has been completely used.

How else do I keep up with total used hours? (Maybe there is a better way)

I like to be able to tell/show a client, on your 80 hour contract, you used 110 hours so next year we should start with 110 hours.

I can easily look at the contract and see how many hours we charged.

What is the alternative way?

It does sound like a block of time works here best, however, if you do not "care" about the overage (i.e. bill the client for the extra hours) then I do not see any benefit in using it. Using reports you can print all Charges for a select Contract and then see the total hours spent under this Contract. It is not as handy as using the Block of Time Contract but if you do not like to see any block overage warning message maybe you can use another type of contract.

nattivillin, most of the time blocks of time are a pre-paid event... the client pays for 50 hours so you set up a block of time for 50 then the deduct from that. In that case, you absolutely want to know when they are getting close to or run out. If you are not doing pre-paid then stick with the global system default contract and just run the reports as suggested.

That said, are we ever going to get the ability to create custom contracts? This was "on the roadmap" about 3 years ago and we have not seen them. What we really need to do here is make sure ALL contracts default to "not billable"... every item through our system requires approval from a manager before it is billed and some contracts are set to default as billable, which sometimes buggers us up. We need to either be able to create custom contracts OR turn off the auto billable option for ALL contracts including the System - Global System Contract.

thanks!!

//ray

Thanks for the suggestions.

Maybe it would be easier to do a global client specific contract and just keep up with the hours. I like not having a run a report to see where they are in hours. When you create a new ticket, and you choose a contract, it immediately shows you the used hours.

That will work fine for us, thanks!