Contract Management with Service Level Agreements

The Contract Manager gives you a digital place to store your agreements you have with your customers. It could be as simple as defining a start/end date for an antivirus subscription or as complex as a managed service contract with defined product discounts and service level agreements.

What it Does

  • Allows you to create contracts that can be attached to SLAs
  • Gives you a place to attach signed copies of agreements you might have
  • Tracks start/end dates, notes, etc for your sales people
  • Allows for defining an SLA to apply to a customer
  • Allows for defining price overrides for any products/services you sell
  • Add reminders, assign a technician, and send emails directly to client from contract
  • Get notified when agreement is getting close to due date
  • Can automatically stop recurring invoices at the end date if you attach them

What it Doesn't Do

  • Electronic document signing

Table of Contents

Tour
Clone Contracts
Contract Pricing
Product Blocklist
SLA's

 

Contract Training Video

 

Tour

To create a contract head over to Customer's tab, select "Customer's Module" and then select "Contract Manager"


Select the green "New Contract" button to start a new Customer Contract and you will then see the screen below. Customer name will auto-populate as you type. From there you will want to name the contract, give it an estimated, likelihood it will close, start and end date, the primary contact, and description. If there is an SLA agreement in place select the dropdown and select the agreement you would like to add.

Select the checkbox if you want the contract to apply to all newly created tickets for the customer. Leave it unchecked to prevent tickets from being under contract automatically. You'll be able to manually associate a ticket with a contract from the Ticket Detail page.

Then select the blue "create contract" button to complete the process.


You will then be brought to the screen below. You can add attachments, reminders, or send out an email via the box highlighted below.

You can also change the contract details at any point by clicking on the options within the white box underneath the "Contract" box or the blue "edit" button on the top right.

Clone Contracts

It is now possible to clone contracts for fast Contract generation.

(Recommended: Take some time to create Contract templates for your various service offerings. That way when you sign/sell a contract you can quickly pull up the template and clone away)

Next search your customer

That's it!

 

Contract Pricing

This will allow you to set special rates for customers on any items within your inventory, including labor.

Simply search for an item by typing the "product's name". The name and original price will auto-populate the fields. You can then change the price under "Contract Price(override)", from there click on "add override".

When you go to an invoice and add the line item to an invoice, it will automatically apply the discount!

Important Note: Once a contract rate is created it will override any manual changes made within the "Add/view charges" module. If you change or add a contract, only line items added after that change will be affected. Previously added line items would still be at the settings that were in effect when they were added.

 

Product Blocklist

You can add products to this field to prevent the selling of products to the customer attached to the Contract. This way someone doesn't accidentally add the wrong product!

Product Blocklist

 

Using the SLA Module with Contracts

What it Does

The 'SLA' module allows you to define and manage your promises to your customers. Each agreement you create can specify how long a ticket is allowed to go without a response, how long before it must be resolved, which tech should start with the ticket, and who the ticket should be escalated to if these promises are broken.

You may assign a Service Level Agreement you've created to an individual ticket or to a contract. If assigned to a contract, all tickets created under that contract will be defaulted to having that agreement. (You can edit the agreement to use if needed.)

You can also manually pause any and all SLA timers and easily view the status of that SLA.

Notifications about SLA breaches can be configured in the Notification Center.

What it Doesn't Do

A Service Level Agreement does not directly interact with the billing or invoicing system. We will not automatically apply a discount for your customers if the agreement is breached.

SLAs do not automatically attach to tickets except through contracts.

Tour

Service Level Agreements may be managed from contracts page:

or from the administration page's side menu here:

When creating a new SLA, or editing an existing one, you'll get a form like this, for you to fill out with your agreement details:

Name: Give a name to the SLA
Description: Add a description for the SLA
Time to Response: Select a time (minutes, hours, days) for the ticket to be responded to.
Note: Time to response is derived from ticket public comments, specifically when the second ticket comment to a customer is made. Autoresponders do not affect time to response.
Time to Resolution: Select a time (minutes, hours, days) for the ticket to be resolved by. If a ticket is paused, this time will not be included in the time to resolution.
SLA Breach Warning: Triggers notifications through the notification center warning when an SLA is about to be breached
SLA Active Hours: Will pause SLA timers based on business hours or use custom hours defined on a per SLA basis
Pause Countdown for Select Ticket Statuses: Selected ticket statuses will automatically pause the SLA timer and start the timer back up when the status is changed to one that is not selected
Assign to Tech: Automatically assign every ticket with this SLA to the defined technician
Re-Assign to Tech if Breached: If the ticket breaches the SLA it will automatically reassign to the defined technician
Set Priority: Allows you to define the priority of the tickets created with this SLA

Viewing SLAs on Tickets

Tickets that have breached an SLA timer will automatically turn to red. Tickets that are in danger of breaching their SLA will turn to orange. You can also see when a ticket was breached by opening the ticket quick view or clicking into the ticket detail page.

SLAs may be assigned to contracts, to apply to all work for a customer, or to individual tickets. Breach of SLA (not providing an initial response in time or not resolving a ticket in time) can trigger notifications, configurable in the Notification Center.

A post was split to a new topic: Electronic document signing