Overview
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.
Things to know
Contracts should not last more than 12 months. For example, if a contract starts on July 1, 2027, it should end on June 30, 2028.
It’s best to start contracts on the first day of the month and end them on the last day of the month. Read our article about how to handle mid-month contracts for more information.
Setup
First, a system administrator must create a new tag that estimators can use for multi-year contracts. Follow the instructions in our article about using tags.
When adding the tag:
Set the Tag Name as “Multi-Year Contract” or something similar.
Set the Tag Type as Opportunity.
Create additional opportunity tags as needed. Some examples of tags that may be helpful:
Year 1, Year 2, etc.
Final Year
Year 1 of 3, Year 2 of 3, etc.
Logic for multi-year agreements
When estimating a multi-year agreement, we recommend setting up the contract in 12 month increments and renewing for each subsequent year.
Processing contract changes
If you set up a contract with an End Date years later than the Start Date, Aspire will generate work tickets for each contract year. If each ticket isn’t scheduled in exactly the correct sequence, processing a mid-year revision becomes incredibly difficult.
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. 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.
To avoid this complexity, process contract renewals every 12 months.
Creating a contract estimate for a multi-year agreement
When creating the estimate, 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 or provide maintenance services.
Important
There should be no more than 12 months between Start and End Dates.
In the following example image, our contract is for the 2027 year. In the Tags field, we enter our “Multi-Year” tag, and a tag showing that this is year one of three.
Finish setting up the opportunity, create the estimate with all services, occurrences, and costs. If the prices won’t change, you can process the following 12 month renewals. If prices might change, or changes to the agreement are likely in the future, we recommend you specify a renewal date. Then, wait until the selected renewal date to process the next year of the contract.
Managing property, price, and process changes
Sometimes, even within a multi-year contract, price increases need to happen. During the renewal process, Aspire presents you with the option to update:
Prices - This is the big one. It would be nice if prices stayed the same all the time, but the reality is that prices often change month to month or even week to week. Over the course of a year, these changes can compound. Updating pricing protects your margins.
Takeoffs - The customer may have increased or reduced the amount of property they want you to service between one year and the next. To ensure accurate estimating and accounting, you may need to update takeoffs.
Display Names and Descriptions - Certain item, service, and kit names or descriptions may have changed over the course of a year. To avoid confusing customers and staff alike with outdated information, renewal is a great time to update these.
Note
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.
Visit Checklists - If services included in the original estimate have visit checklists associated, this option lets you update those if any checklist items changed. This option appears even if none of the services on the estimate have visit checklists.
Schedule an Event Assignments - Renewal time is an opportunity to control Route and Sequence Numbers.