Additional Setup Tasks for Contract Management

In addition to the settings on the Contract Management settings form, you should complete some additional tasks to facilitate contract management.

Formulate Policies and Procedures

Consistent and clear policies and procedures will promote better contract management and make contract management reports more useful. Review the data that can be entered for contracts in the Projects hub and make decisions about how you want to use those fields, particularly in terms of filtering reports.

For example:

• How do you want to number contracts? Will contracts you are pursuing have different numbering schemes than your final contracts?
• What date should be used as contract request date? (Typically, this is the date when the contract discussion started.)
• What date should be used as contract approved date? (This date is usually the date that the contract is signed.)
• How do you want to associate contracts with a fiscal period? (Some examples are the period in which the request date falls, the period in which the current contract status was assigned, or the period in which the approved date falls.)

Note that the associated period is not only a reporting concern. It is particularly important if you plan to use contract amounts in custom revenue methods to calculate revenue using the revenue generation process. That process only includes in its revenue calculations the amounts for contracts that are associated with the current fiscal period or an earlier period.

Set Up Contract Status and Contract Type Lists

Two key contract fields, Contract Status (for example, In Negotiation or Approved & Signed) and Contract Type (for example, Original or Change Order), provide lists of valid entries that users select from. You define those lists for your enterprise on the Lists form in Settings > Labels and Lists > Lists.

Review the default values for these lists, and add, change, or delete values to tailor the lists to your needs. In general, it is best to keep the lists as simple as possible while still meeting your procedural and reporting needs.

In addition to the Contract Management report, you can also filter other project reports by contract status and contract type (for example, the Office Earnings, Project Earnings, and Project Summary reports).

Set Up Workflows

You can use the workflow capabilities to trigger notifications and update fields automatically based on changes in contract information. For example, you could automatically generate an email notification to the principal for the project when the status of a contract changes to Pending. A second workflow could alert your accounting department when the contract is signed so they can approve the project for processing.

You can set up workflows for contract management in Settings > Workflow > User Initiated Workflows or Settings > Workflow > Scheduled Workflows. You should select Projects in the Area field for the workflow, but to trigger actions based on contract data, you must change the default workflow table to the Contracts table.