ADMIN: Configuring contract features

The following settings apply to all contract types equally:

• You can fully customize the default list of contract categories used in Autotask reporting. Refer to Contract categories.
• Contracts contain a lot of financial data that should not be exposed outside of your Finance department. To keep access to financial data restricted to users who need to know, you can configure your custom security levels to either restrict or altogether prevent access to contracts. Refer to Contract Visibility.
• You can create reusable sets of exclusion rules for work types and roles that can be applied to multiple contracts. Refer to Managing contract exclusion sets.
• A system setting lets you determine if the default Service Desk Contract for a customer should also automatically be applied to tickets entered by your customer via the Client Portal. Refer to Use default service desk contract for all Client Portal tickets.

If you will be using recurring service contracts, the following additional settings must be configured:

• You must set up at least one billing code for services. Refer to Service codes.
• You must set up at least one service that can be added to a contract. Services can be set up manually, or imported. Refer to Setting up your services and Populating the Services import template.
• You may optionally set up service bundles that can be added to a contract. Refer to Setting up service bundles.
• If you want to track profitability and performance not just at the contract, but at the service and service bundle level, you will want to
  • Configure which security levels can select or modify the service or bundle on ticket time entries, ticket charges, task and issue time entries, project charges, and contract charges. Refer to Tracking profitability and performance at the service level and Creating or editing a custom security level.
  • Associate service level agreements (SLAs) with services and service bundles. Refer to Setting up your services and Setting up service bundles.
• You may occasionally need to update the cost or prices of services associated with active contracts. Refer to Bulk service updater.

f you will be using fixed price contracts, the following additional settings must be configured:

• You must set up billing codes for revenue from Fixed Price contracts. Refer to Milestone codes.
• You may set up additional billing milestone statuses for fixed price contracts that can be used for reporting and analysis. Refer to Billing milestone statuses.

• If you want to bill your customers by the contact or by the device, you must configure rule-based billing. Refer to Billing by the contact or device.