Multi-Year contracts

[loberle]

I am trying to add a multi year contract. What is the best way to do this? Do I add a separate line contract for each year?

Depending on the contract, I may have different Annual Rates. I tried to select   "Annually" for the payment schedule, but if I put the full amount of the contract (3 year amount) , it reports it as the yearly cost.

[Community Alums]

No, you can use them for the contracts you want. You do not put the contract amount in the Financial section of the main form. That is populated automatically with the total of your rate cards.

[Community Alums]

One thing I failed to point out: if you do not see Rate Cards, you need to activate the Cost Management plugin. This should not incur any additional license fees.

[loberle]

I have entered a contract with rate cards to call out the three years of payments.

So I have a question..

The rate cards are entered with the correct start, end, and next payment date. The amount is included as well.

I left the actual contract Financial tab blank. The payment amount is listed in the financial tab with a random number that doesn't correlate to any of my fields. It did calculate the total cost of the contract in the Yearly cost but it is the total cost for all three years, not just a yearly amount.

Thoughts?

[buckhill2]

I am facing the same problem.   Our CIO wants to know Annual Cost of contracts.   It was easy to add this field to the Contract form.   It takes what I enter in the Financial tab and calculates the annual cost so we can rank them by annual spend in a report.

I have started using the rate cards for multi year contracts with increasing rates.   this works good, but the Annual cost shown if for all 3 years, not the current one in effect.   Help!

Thanks, Jeff

[loberle]

@Jeff

I am still having issues with calculations for three year rate cards. My current work around is that I mark the rate cards that are not for that year as non active. This is a huge pain as you have to remember to turn it back on. I am seeing other issues with costs in the contract piece. It seems that is it hit or miss   if the yearly cost field calculates based on the rate cards. Also, the fields themselves are misleading when it comes to the naming convention.

I would think that the fields you would truly need to see from a contract standpoint, is total Monthly Cost, Total Yearly Cost, Total Contract Cost.

The Lifetime cost field only seems to be calculation what has been spent from the beginning of the contract to current.