In this video we're going to look at how to create a service contract. A service contract is an agreement between our company and one of our customers to perform some repeat planned maintenance works at one of their sites.

The service contract within Teampoint manages this agreement, it manages the creation of jobs invoices. We can also use the service contract as part of the sales process, to renew the agreement when it comes to an end.

To create a new one we find the new option on our menu on the left and we select Service Contract. This is the form to enter a new service contract. The first thing we need to do is to find our site, so we search in our site database and find the site. We're just gonna use a test site. Once the site's loaded, we get some summary information about this site to help us, to give us some additional information. So that's the summary information here, open jobs, open quotes all those kind of things. Let's start filling out the service contract details. We can enter a contract summary if we want, so let's say, contract to cover all planned maintenance works. Next we look at entering the start and end date, the start date controls when this service contract becomes active. We might want to put it with the date in the future if we're not ready to start the work for a couple of months or we can put it today and this will kick in immediately. The end date is mainly used to drive the contract renewal process. So if we have an end date here we've got a 10 year contract for instance, we could set up a one year contract or a three year contract or a five year contract whatever we like. We use end date to stop those services being generated automatically when we get to the end of our contract, but also before we get to the end of our contract it manages the contract renewal process, so there's certain sales messages and alerts that that are triggered by this end date. We'll look at those in another video, here we're just looking at how to create the contract. The status, there are a few different statuses here which have various different uses, again will cover them in a different video, for now we'll just put it as live. It's just a live contract. We'll choose a salesperson, we can enter purchase order number and we'll also set the invoice type. We'll cover the invoice type in a minute, let's add some services onto our contract first.

This is the service section down here. To add additional services we just click the plus button. We'll do that, this window is now opened to allow us to enter the details of the services that we want to perform as part of this contract. Let's choose a service item first, let's say fire alarm test and service. Quantities gonna be one, the price, let's put that in at £500. The division is not particularly important right now. The equipment, if we have assets registered against our site and this service relates to a specific asset then we can choose that piece of equipment here. It's optional so if it were a PAT test for instance which is doing lots of small pieces of equipment we would probably leave this blank. As this one is a fire alarm test and service, we may want to choose the particular fire alarm that we want to service. As long as that's recorded against the site, we can do that, so let's say this is the fire alarm in the main building. Grouping, this allows us togroup different service items onto the same jobs, if we want the same technician to do multiple items on the same visit. If we don't, we can put a different grouping against them and then they can be allocated to different people. We'll come to that later as well in another video, so we'll leave group blank for the time being. Now we're looking at the mode, so the mode is basically how often we need to repeat this particular service - it might be monthly, twice per month , weekly or could be repeat - which we'll look at in aa second or could be daily. For my fire alarm service I want to do it once a year, so I'm gonna put this down as repeat and I want to repeat this every 365 days. Next service, I'm gonna to set it due on the 1st of next month. We can have a description here, which will get pulled into the job. Let's let's put, test and service fire alarm in main building, so that will get pulled into the job, for a technician to see. We can save that, so I've now added a service item onto my contract.

Very often a contract is going to cover multiple items, so let's add another one. We have a fire alarm service, and that's gonna happen once a year, every 365 days and the next visit is on the 1st of October. Let's add another item. The next thing we're gonna put on here is a Legionella test. Let's put a price against that and let's choose our equipment. We're gonna put this against the water tank which we have registered on site. This one we're gonna do it monthly, so we can choose which week of the month we'd like to do this on ideally. Could be the first, second, third of fourth, so let's leave this on first. I'm now gonna choose which month that I want to service this equipment, so I'm gonna choose March, June, September and December. This is a quarterly service effectively. We'll save this item, we can now see down here we've got our water sampling legionella test once a month, in the first week of the month, this is gonna happen in March June September and December.

We'll add one more item. This is going to be a PAT testing, we'll put a price on there, we're not gonna select equipment cause it's gonna be many small items of equipment so there's not really any need for that. Let's say this one is gonna be twice a year and let's put this one in January and July. We'll save that, so we've now added our three items that this service contract covers at this site at the top.

The only thing left for us to do is to look at the invoicing type. This is the thing that we left earlier on. The default is invoice after service and what that means is these jobs will be generated as they're required. so this one will create a job for me probably in December to be performed in January, probably in June to be performed in July. The jobs will have the value that we put on the lines, and once the job is completed it will go through invoicing in the normal way. The job gets completed and then the job gets invoiced. That's invoice after service. The alternative is prepaid, so let's have a quick look at that. If we select prepaid, what this means is that the service contract will be invoice separately from the jobs. Here we have a one yearly visit, here we have a quarterly visit, and here we have a biannually visit. It might be that we just choose to invoice the whole contract every month. The contract is suggesting that we need to invoice £241 per month, so it might be that I put £200 a month, and say that my next invoice is due on the first. We can also set a nominal code for integrating with our accounts package we're not worried too much about that, Invoice description might just be monthly ppm charge. So by choosing prepaid, what we're doing is we're separating our invoicing from the works that we do. If we choose invoice after service, then the work gets invoiced as soon as the work is completed. If we choose prepaid, then we can choose how much to bill every month. We don't have to bill the exact number that matches here it might be that we wanted to invoice more or invoice less. We get a little warning at the top, this is how much it thinks we should be in voicing. If our monthly invoice matches then this goes green just to let us know that we've done the right thing, but we may have an agreement to invoice more or to invoice less. Let's say we we choose to invoice £500 and we want to invoice that every other month. We can set our invoicing up to do whatever we need to satisfy the service contract, in the same way that we can set upour works to happen at any time.

That's how you set up a service contract in Teampoint. You choose your site, you set the start and end dates for the contract, we choose the invoicing type for the contract whether that's invoice after service or prepaid and we choose the services that we want to perform and the regularity or the interval of each service.