New Managed Services Contract Setup

We just singed our first managed contracts (after reading the suggested book from these forums, Managed Services In A Month by Karl W. Palachuk). Now I'm trying to figure out how to do this inCommitCRM. For the last year, we've always only used the default contract.

I just want to set this up right the first time so I appreciate any suggestions.

Our contract includes:
* 1 year term
* MSP style monitoring/patch management services
* Unlimited phone support
* 4 hours onsite support per month, unused rolling to next month until contract expiration

After reviewing the forums here and documentation, I can only see how to do this with two contracts:
Contract 1: Setup one as an "all you can eat" / Block of Money for the unlimited remote support and monitoring. I guess I could include the costs of monitoring in the contract charges as to keep up with them as well on the contracts.
Contract 2: Setup Block of Time for the 4 hours.

Questions:
1. What value should I use the Block of Money? $.01, $100000+, or maybe the annual contract amount? I don't want it warning techs they've gone over, but I think it may provide useful reporting for judging the value of the contract.
2. Any way to keep up with roll-over hours?
3. Like others have said, I want the invoices to show all services rendered on the bill. So, is the only way to do this, to manually check BILLABLE, then set services to $0? Problem there is then, reports from the block of money would be useless?
4. Are two contracts the best/only way to go?
5. Any way to set a expiration date of 1 year? Going monthly right now for billing purposes.

Side note: I highly recommend the book above on MSP approach. It has been very well received by customers.

Thanks for any feedback!

Hi Joshua,

Thanks for sending in these questions. I’ve copied them for easy reference, and attached relevant answers below. Please review.

• What value should I use the Block of Money? $.01, $100000+, or maybe the annual contract amount? I don't want it warning techs they've gone over, but I think it may provide useful reporting for judging the value of the contract.
  When using All-you-can-eat contracts, we suggest setting the block value to the same price that you charge for the contract. I.e. if you're using a monthly contract, then set the contract block value to the same value that you charge your customer for, so that you can monitor profitability for your contracts. This will enable you to see which contracts prices may need reevaluating.
  
  
• Any way to keep up with roll-over hours?
  When an employee is about to save a charge in the system that is about to pass the contract block value, your employee can decide whether or not to issue the charge with the current values. If you decide that you want to apply higher rates to the hours beyond the block, then your employee should create 2 charges. The first charge would be a normal charge which would 0 out the balance of the block, and the second charge would be set as billable with any pricing values you'd need to be set.
  
  
• Like others have said, I want the invoices to show all services rendered on the bill. So, is the only way to do this, to manually check BILLABLE, then set services to $0? Problem there is then; reports from the block of money would be useless?
  The RangerMSP reports that you generate include all the charges you've set in the system for the ticket you've generated the report for. I.e. your RangerMSP reports will show both billable and not billable charges. This will allow you to print reports that show all billable/non billable charges, while the charge summary would only sum up the charge values for the billable charges. If you want to reflect non billable charges in a QuickBooks invoice, you can use the Include not billable charges option in the RangerMSP QuickBooks invoice generation wizard.
  
  
• Are two contracts the best/only way to go?
  Using 2 contracts in your case is the best and easiest way to monitor the 2 separate services you offer your customers. This will allow you to see all actions performed within specific contracts, to make sure that you're not exceeding your terms.
  
  
• Any way to set an expiration date of 1 year? Going monthly right now for billing purposes.
  You'd be right to use monthly contracts in order to maintain monthly billing terms. Each time a contract is renewed, the contract code is copied from the previous contract, and suffixed with a decimal. I.e. .0001, .0002, .0003, etc. This would also allow you to monitor how many times a contract has been renewed. Monthly contracts that have been renewed 11 times would show <Contract-Code>.0011 on the 12th month. Let us know if this helps.

Let us know if you have additional questions on these topics.

Regards,
Sherry

If you are going to use more then one contract good luck sorting through contracts once you are a few months into it. I've made several requests to only display CURRENT contracts - but had no luck - When creating a ticket and selecting which contract to use CommitCRM displays ALL contracts NOT just active contracts - so you have to scroll through many instead of two active contracts... Pretty silly an UNPRODUCTIVE if you ask me. Why they cannot just display active contracts is beyond me....

We have three contracts for one client and in their second year - so you can imagine how many contracts there are that we have to go through.

Hi Easy I.T.,

Thanks for posting this.
After running a quick check in this feature request to update the Contracts module, I'd like to convey that the product management team has discussed this feature, and that it will move on to development stages in the near future; however, it probably won't make it in time for RangerMSP 5.3.

Thanks for the feedback; we understand why implementing this would make your workflow easier.

Hope this helps.

Regards,
Rinat

I have read the above but have a further question about rollover hours. We provide our clients with a contract similar to those of cell phone companies where you buy so many minutes a month and what you do not use will rollover to the next month in addition to the minutes you get with your plan. Is there any way to set this kind of concept up with CommitCRM contracts?

hugicr, I assume that you're using a Block of Time in your case and wish to pass the remaining time to the next contract.
To achieve this you should first create the Next Month contract normally (manually, or using the Batch Contract renewal wizard), and then, edit the newly created contract manually changing the block starting balance from the contract default value to the contract default plus the remaining time from the previous contract.

You can learn how to modify the initial Block contract value here.

Dina

Do you anticipate that CommitCRM will at some point be able to manage rollover hours better? Seems to be very time consuming to manually adjust the hours for each account/contract each month, or in our case each week.

Yes, I believe that it will be enhanced in the future as we usually add new options based on users' feedback.

Thanks,
Dina

Don't hold your breath though - I'm still waiting on what would appear to be an extremely simple fix that just about every user of the Outlook link has requested that was orgininally raised over 18 months ago (outlook popup anyone?).

Sorry CommitCRM team - you are all very friendly and helpful on the forums and I love the product but you don't set realistic expectations when answering questions like these. Each release we see heaps of new features that were rarely mentioned on the forums as requests by users, and many enhancements repeatedly asked for on the forums for a long time are nowhere to be seen in the product. Unless there are a huge stream of emails direct to support from users asking for enhancements that dont post on the forums (which is possible of course) it seems sometimes feature priority is lead by what the developers want, not the users.

Nathan

natrat,

We believe that you are completely wrong here :-)
ALL of our new features and enhancements are always based on users feedback! We get tons of feedback by email and on this forum, not everything can be implemented at the same time, but everything that is being implemented is always, again, always, based on features and ideas we get from our community.

As for the Outlook sync popup (which is not related to this thread in any way so let's try not to hijack this thread discussing it here...) - The coming RangerMSP 5.3 handles this - in case you'll be working in any other application - Word, Outlook, Remote Management tool, Surfing the Web - doing anything else, the RangerMSP auto-sync with Outlook will fire without taking the focus - in other words - it will not interrupt any other work you're doing :-)

Cheers,
Sherry

Wow, that's great news Sherry! Glad to hear it!

Thanks for sharing the info sherry, it was nice to hear those updates.

We really need to revisit this feature. We need the ability to offer roll-over time/money to the renewal contract. Also, we need a feature to handle the original contract amount versus the overage. Currently, we are updating the block of money amount to handle the overage but we have to remember to set the old values to the renewal. This needs to be addressed.

Thank you for your comments. Noted.

Two years later.. still waiting.

hehe. I gave up making any suggestions years ago, you get a standard form answer and they just do whatever they want.

Apparently every single thing they do is based on user feedback. If that is true, what would be excellent is for them to publish the development map with the potential new features that the userbase could then publically comment on and upvote/downvote and submit new options for others to assess. Then you have a transparent development path that really is based on real feedback and requests from users. But that will never happen either. I just shut up and pay my money, workaround their systems wherever possible, and remind myself after 8 or so years of the same thing that you get what you pay for and its still a very good system for the money.

@Seankubin - We do plan to introduce some changes and new options for Contracts later this year.

@natrat - Thanks for your feedback, we appreciate it and try to learn from it, even when it isn't always music-to-our-ears. RangerMSP is a large scale app and tons of functionality has been added, especially over the last couple of years. As you can imagine, we receive tons of feedback (mainly over email) and truly appreciate and consider each suggestion and idea. The unfortunate truth is that not every suggestion can or will be implemented. This isn't specific to RangerMSP. Yes, we totally get it and it might be very frustrating, especially when a feature that you've suggested or been waiting for hasn't been implemented yet. Rest assure though that we are, and have always been (since 2004!), making all efforts to base the functionality of new versions based on actual user feedback. Thanks!