Purpose

It's common for contracts to need changes while the work is in progress. Aspire allows you to revise a contract and apply those revisions to future work, while keeping a history of the work already completed under the previous contract terms.

With Aspire, you can add new services to a contract, edit existing services, or remove services entirely!

You can also change the details of existing services, such as changing the number of service visits/occurrences or swapping out specific materials used for that service.

This article covers how Aspire makes it easy to transition to new contract terms by revising the existing contract, rather than having to create an entirely new contract from scratch!

⚠️ If you need to change the number of service visits/occurrences, Aspire recommends creating a brand new contract to replace the old one, rather than using the contract revision feature. Changing visit counts with revisions is not recommended.

The following steps summarize the process for making changes to an active contract in Aspire:

📌Note: This cycle may occur multiple times throughout the life of the contract. During any particular change cycle, multiple individual changes can be made to a contract’s services.

A good example of this is that you could add two services, remove one service, and change several item costs associated with another service – all within the timeframe of a single contract change cycle.

The original contract is considered to be revision zero (0) with successive revisions being in numerical order (v.1, v.2, v.3, etc.)

🧠When looking at the estimate for a job that has undergone contract revisions, Aspire allows you to see the revision history for the services on the contract.

✅To access Opportunities to make changes, you would need either View Opportunities or View Only My Opportunities added to your user role.

✅If you need to make a change on a Contract, you need to have Change Contract Opportunity added to your user role.

Contract changes are performed on the Opportunity screen by selecting the Change option in the three dot menu.

The Change option is only available if:

When you select Change on the Opportunity screen for a job that is in process, Aspire displays the Change Opportunity box that requires you to set a start date for the revision.

As you begin to make your change, keep the following in mind:

🧠 If you are changing an opportunity that has an active revision, the Active Revision Start Date would also be displayed.

To proceed with the contract change, click the Save icon. To cancel the contract change, click the Cancel icon.

Each revision created for your opportunities is assigned a revision number starting with v.1. Your original estimate details will be displayed with v.0 next to them!

After you Save, Aspire creates a contract revision for the opportunity, and sets the Revision Status to Changes Pending. The Revision Status remains in Changes Pending status until the contract revision is won or canceled.

An important thing to know is that it is not mandatory that you make price adjustments immediately; you can leave the Estimate screen, and go back later to make the changes.​

For the contracts that have changes pending, Aspire removes the following options from the three dot menu, which are normally available for the Opportunity:

🧠This is because these options should not be used while contract changes are pending!

When a revision is in Pending status, you will be able to apply the following updates to the contract:

These will be discussed later on in the article, or skip to those sections by clicking on the above bullet points! 👆

When you are ready, you can go back to the Estimate screen to make your adjustments to services.

You can do this by selecting the Estimated $ icon on the Opportunity screen, or by clicking the Estimate subtab:

📌 Note: Until you win the revision, you can go back to the Estimates screen to apply additional updates.

⚠️ It's important to understand that over the period of time during which you are making changes to the contract, Aspire will still allow your company to schedule and complete active tickets associated with the Contract based on the existing contract version rather than the new version whose changes are pending.

This period of time can be anywhere from a few minutes to multiple days to even weeks. By the time you are ready to Win the changes, tickets may have been completed that you had originally intended to change.​

For services that you added to the contract, Aspire will generate new tickets as if the contract had just been won. They will be displayed with anew version number.

Aspire will notify you when you try to win the contract, but may not allow you to complete the winning of the contract.

🧠 Being aware of these potential conflicts can help you to adjust your business processes accordingly.

It’s a good idea to communicate within your organization when a contract is being changed so that work tickets are not in use while the change is being updated in Aspire.

👇 Below, we discuss the different types of contract revisions that can be made while completing a contract change!

When the estimate is in pending status, the plus icon (+) will be available to the left of every opportunity service, just like it is when estimating during Bidding.

📌 Note: Any services added are considered pending and will show green bars on the sides until the revision has been won.

As you complete your contract changes, you can delete existing services if they are no longer needed for your customer’s estimate. When the estimate is in Pending status, the vertical three dot menu will be available to the right of each active service.

🧠Individual items or kits, underneath an active service, can not be deleted without deleting the parent service, so they do not have a three dot menu!

Sometimes, you might have to change a service with multiple occurrences. You can do this in Aspire, even if some of your multiple occurrence tickets have been used.

The service in this example for Monthly Mowing at Camille’s Oasis has 12 occurrences.

When the change is for a multi-occurrence service, Aspire will have you select the ticket on which the change begins by giving a dropdown list of tickets that are in an Open or Scheduled status.

Once you have selected the right ticket occurrence, click the Save icon . On the estimate screen, the changed service will display with yellow ends.

In our example, two versions of the service will be shown:

Now, you can make changes to the individual fields for the new version of the service and to its items.

You can change the starting work ticket as needed, until you win the contract change.

If you reduce the number of occurrences for a service, when you win the changes, Aspire will cancel the number of open or scheduled tickets to bring the total occurrences in line with the new number of occurrences.

⚠️ It’s recommended that you avoid changing the number of service occurrences using a contract change. If it is necessary to change the number of occurrences, it is recommended that you cancel the original contract and create a new contract to replace it.

🧠Make sure that there are a sufficient number of open or scheduled tickets for Aspire to cancel, otherwise you will receive an error when you try to win the changes.

📌 Note: You cannot delete a service with pending changes. If you decide to delete the service, you will first have to undo the changes.

While changes are Pending for a job, you can change active services into optional services or optional services into active services.

When you need to change an Optional Service ➡️ Active Service, and also when you change an Active Service ➡️ Optional Service, Aspire requires you to physically move the locations of your services on the Estimate details screen!

Here’s a good example of this:

To change your Optional Service to an Active Service, place your cursor over the symbol to the left of the version number. The cursor will display as four arrows pointing outward.

🧠Reminder: The yellow highlighted line items are letting you know that you have pending changes!

While a job is in a Pending status, Aspire changes the menu options available at the top right of the Estimate screen. The following options are in the three dot menu for all contracts:

Selecting the Win Contract Change option will lock in all changes applied to the contract. When you select this option, Aspire will check if:

⚠️ If any of these conditions are not met, Aspire will display an error message. You won’t be able to apply the changes until you have corrected the error.

🧠If everything is checked and passes, if the opportunity is Fixed Payment invoice type, you’ll be able to update and save the Payment Schedule to fully win the change.

Aspire will create, update or cancel tickets associated with that contract based on changes that you have applied:

If you entered changes to existing services, Aspire will update them based on the actions you made in your change:

💡In the example below, because the service for Monthly Mowing was decreased from 12 occurrences to 10, visits 11 and 12 were automatically canceled when the Contract Change was won.

In the Estimate screen after the change has been won, Aspire will continue to display the version of the service as it existed before the change, but the previous version will be grayed out.

Expanding the earlier version services will still allow you to see the underlying items and kits for the inactive version of the service.

Selecting the Edit Contract Change option will reopen the Change Opportunity dialog box shown when you started the change. You can update the revision start date here as needed during your contract change.

Selecting the Undo Contract Change option will remove all pending service additions, deletions, or changes from the contract and remove the contract from Change Pending status.

When you initially create a contract estimate with a Fixed Payment invoice type is completed, Aspire requires you to create a payment schedule that will create invoices in Invoicing Assistant at specific times.

When you change a contract, Aspire requires you to update the payment schedule to reflect any changes to cost for ongoing customer payments. Update the payment schedule by clicking the Edit Payment Schedule icon.

After confirming that you wish to Win the changes, if you have not already updated the payment schedule, Aspire will automatically bring up the Edit Payment Schedule screen so that you can change the new payment schedule.

When you save the changes by clicking the Save icon, Aspire will complete winning the contract changes.

If you click the Cancel icon, Aspire will not complete the winning of the changes and the changes will still be pending.

The Pricing Summary screen shows financial information for the contract as if changes have been applied. This means that deleted services or prior versions of new services are not included.

Navigate to the Pricing Summary by clicking the three dot menu at the top of the Estimate screen and selecting Pricing Summary.

The Pricing Summary for your contract allows you to review the expected cost and margin that includes the new estimate changes before winning the contract change:

This option allows you to generate a summary of all material and labor costs on the estimate.

This estimate sheet is mostly used to confirm pricing with vendors before delivering the bid to the customer.

Choosing this option will display a window that allows you to select the report layout. Estimate Sheet layouts are able to be configured by submitting a layout request to AspireCare.

📑To look into options for your Estimate Sheet layouts, click here!

Contracts can be printed from the Print Proposal option in the three dot menu.

There are two options to the Report Settings dialog window that will allow you to modify the proposal that the system generates:

When you renew a contract that has changes, the renewal is created based on the most recent revision of the contract. If, for example, you are renewing a contract that has a mowing service v.0 that was replaced by mowing service v.1, Aspire will apply the v.1 mowing service to the revision.