Table of Contents
Purpose
Generally, maintenance contract agreements are for one season and renewable in following years. However, in some cases, you might have created a multi-year agreement with a customer. This article discusses best practices for managing multi-year contracts in Aspire.
Setup
⚠️ A System Administrator will need to create a new Opportunity Tag which will be used by the estimators when creating multi-year contracts.
To do this:
Go to the Administration module.
Select the Application tab at the top of the screen.
Select the Lists subsection.
From the Select a List drop down menu, select Tag.
Create a new tag by selecting the New icon
Enter the new Tag Name (such as Multi-Year Contract) and Tag Type (which should be Opportunity).
Save the new tag by selecting the Save icon in the top right.
Repeat steps 5-7 for each tag needing to be created.
Other opportunity tags that may be helpful:
Year 1
Year 2
Year 3
Final Year
Year 1 of 3
Year 2 of 3
Year 3 of 3
Logic of 12 Month Contracts for Multi-Year Agreements
When estimating a multi-year agreement, Aspire recommends setting up the contract in 12 month increments and renewing for each following year.
This is the ideal way to manage such agreements for two major reasons:
1. Managing Price Increases:
Sometimes, even within a multi-year contract, price increases need to happen. During the renewal process, Aspire will prompt you with options to:
Update takeoffs
Choose to update using the current takeoff information for the property tied to your contracts. Only takeoff quantities will be updated with the first option. Other values related to quantities will stay the same.
If you use the 2nd option, updated takeoff quantities will not be reflected in your renewal. Instead, the takeoffs set up in your original opportunity are used.
Update Service Names
These options allow you to avoid having to enter service display names manually.
Update prices
These options allows you to keep the prices established in the original opportunity in the renewal or update the price with or without markups, given the current cost changes of items, kits, and services.
Update Visit Checklists
This option is for opportunities that have existing Visit Checklists. You will always see this option displayed even if the Opportunity or Service Catalog does not contain visit checklists.
Update Schedule an Event Assignments
This option allows you to control Route and Sequence Numbers when renewing your opportunities.
🧠 The simple act of renewing the contract for a new 12 month period can make managing price increases much simpler than processing a contract revision.
2. Processing Contract Changes:
If a contract is set up with an End Date years later than the Start Date, Aspire will generate work tickets for each Contract Year. It would then be essential that those Work Tickets be scheduled in the exact sequence!
If this does not happen, processing a mid-year revision becomes incredibly difficult.
For example: A third contract-year work ticket is scheduled, with costs allocated against it, and is marked complete in the first year. However, your customer calls to make a revision in the second year.
In order to process the revision, closed months would have to be re-opened and ticket costs would have to be swapped to enable a revision or cancellation.
🧠 Processing revisions for a contract set up in a 12 month period will not involve the same complexity.
Creating a Contract Estimate for a Multi-Year Agreement
When creating the estimate, enter a Start Date and End Date.
The Start Date should always be the first day of the first month that you will invoice and/or begin maintenance services.
The End Date should always be the last day of the last month that you intend to invoice and/or provide maintenance services.
⚠️ There should be no more than 12 months between Start and End Dates.
In this example, our contract is for the 2023 year:
In the Tag Field, add the Multi-Year tag and also add a tag for what year the contract is in:
When all required fields have been entered, create the estimate with all services, occurrences, and costs.
If the prices will not change, you can process the following 12 month renewals.
However, if there is any possibility of price increases or changes to the agreement in the future, it is recommended that a renewal date be specified. Then, wait until the selected renewal date to process the next year of the contract.