Purpose
While it's never a good thing, sometimes it's necessary to cancel a contract with a customer in the middle of the year. When this occurs, there are certain considerations and steps to be followed to cancel the contract in Aspire effectively.
Process Overview
Below is an overview of the basic steps you should take for a contract cancellation:
1. Determine The Cancellation Date
Determine the date on which the cancellation will become effective. This is the date that the customer calls and says to cancel the contract.
No services should be performed after that date. Cancelling will cancel any tickets scheduled after that date. This must be a date after which you will not be billing for any additional materials or labor.
2. Complete or Cancel Tickets Prior to Cancellation Date
Make sure all tickets with time or material posted prior to the cancellation date have been completed in Aspire.
All tickets schedule before the cancellation date, regardless of whether there are costs, must be explicitly completed or cancelled before you cancel the opportunity. Aspire does not cancel tickets scheduled prior to the cancellation date – it leaves them open.
To do this:
Go to the Work Tickets search list screen.
Create a filter condition for the list where the Opportunity Number (a) matches the opportunity to be cancelled and Scheduled Start Date (b) is less than or equal to the cancellation date.
This will generate a list of all tickets that you must manually complete or cancel before cancelling the opportunity.
(See the Collection List Building Basics to learn how to filter or add columns)Complete or cancel these tickets by checking the checkbox (c) next to the needed tickets
Then, Bulk Actions Menu (d) in the upper right-hand corner of the screen.
Select the Complete (e) option or the Cancel (f) option
Use these functions on groups of the opportunity's work tickets until all tickets displayed in the search list have been completed or cancelled.
3. Invoice Your Customer
Review the original opportunity to be sure all of the appropriate months prior to cancellation have been invoiced.
For Fixed Payment contract opportunities, review the payment schedule.
For Per Service or Time & Materials contract opportunities, review the ticket list while displaying the invoiced amount as shown in the work ticket list example above.
Invoice the customer for any services delivered prior to the cancellation date.
4. Cancel the Contract
Go to the Opportunity Search Screen and search for your opportunity
After clicking on your opportunity, select Cancel (a) from the three dot menu in the upper right.
5. Validate the Cancellation
Check the job status of the opportunity to be sure that it changes to Cancelled (b).
If the status remains In Production after having canceled it, check the work tickets screen to be sure all tickets are in either a Complete or Cancelled status.
Recheck opportunity status to be sure it is in the status of Cancelled.
6. Handle the Credit Balance
If there is a credit balance and the customer demands a refund, this will need to be handled manually by issuing a credit memo in Aspire.
If the customer does not have a balance due, and they are not going to do any more business with you, process a refund if a credit balance remains.
7. Review Revenue Adjustment
Once a month is closed, Aspire will automatically make appropriate revenue adjustments for opportunities that have been cancelled during that month.
This could be either a positive or negative adjustment depending upon the total dollars invoiced versus the total dollars earned as found in the Over/Under Report.
After you have closed the month:
Navigate to Reports
Click Standard Reports
Click End of Month Report in the Accounting group
It should default to the Revenue tab
Click the Revenue Variance line
Drill into this number and review all the cancelled jobs for the month.
Compare against your Over / Under report.