About contracts
Important: These processes are determined with the implementation consultant during the implementation and can therefore deviate from this standard description. Any change in the setup is NOT part of the support contract.
The maintenance of contract types is discussed in the maintenance of data manual.
Contract Process
Schematic representation of the activities of the process:

The contract is created and sent for further approval.
In the activity “Finance Check” the coding parameters in the contract lines can be added or edited by the coders. Please note that this is linked to a specific application setting in which is determined if this step should be included in the full process. After this, the contract is sent into the approval process. This can consist of multiple approvals depending on implementation. After being approved, the contract needs to be confirmed by the contract owner.
After the approval of the contract owner, the initiator of the contract is informed about the approval.
Enter Contract
A new contract can be entered by using the ‘new’ button in the dashboard tile of contracts:

Or by using the menu Initiate, Contract:

When a user creates a new contract, the cost center field is copied from the user maintenance. Only contract types with NO cost center or with the exact same cost center can be selected in the drop down menu for contract types. Based on the contract type, several other fields can be prefilled such as supplier and contract manager.
The contract manager is by default copied from the contract type and when empty filled with the current user, but can be overruled by manual selection. Within the section of contract dates several checks are executed to make sure that all relevant dates and periods are prefilled in order to be able to determine prolongation date, signal date and end date of the contract.

Fields Contract Header
Start date: the start date of the contract. Based on this date, multiple other dates are prefilled by default.
Renewal period in months: Duration of the contract in months. By default this is prefilled with 12 (months).
Next renewal date: Start date + the months from renewal period in months. This represents the end date of the contract term.
Renewal notice period: Term in months which is maintained for cancelling the contract. By default this is prefilled with 3 (months). Usually this is mentioned in the contract documentation.
Ultimate cancellation date: Renewal date – the renewal notice period.
Signal notice period: Term in months which is used to start the Contract Renewal process (in order to prolong or terminate a contract). By default this is prefilled with 1 (month). This is the time that you have before the ultimate cancellation date to decide if the contract will be prolonged or not.
Signal date: The date on which the Contract Renewal process is started.
End date: Actual end date of the contract when the contract is terminated or is definite. Depending on a setting in the contract type, this field can be required.
In contract lines, fields can be prefilled based on transaction defaults for the selected supplier.

Fields Contract Lines
Description: Enter the description of the contract line.
Ledger: Enter the ledger for this contract line. (Can be prefilled from a transaction default.)
Cost center: Enter the cost center for this contract line. (Can be prefilled from header or from transaction default.)
VAT: Enter the VAT code for this contract line.
Price: Enter the price of the periodic invoice. This is the amount of the invoice which has to be paid weekly, monthly or yearly e.g.
Quantity is the quantity of units e.g. the quantity of monthly rent.
Field Def. qty inv/ord is the quantity of units per invoice. If the rent is paid per quarter, the def. qty inv/ord is 3 (once per 3 months an invoice is received).
Amount contract: price * quantity
(prefilling the section “Contract Review” and “Review Lines” is not required. As this is part of the feature for contract reviews, this will be discussed in that part of the manual.)
A contract can have one or more lines. If you need to split the costs over multiple entities (like cost centers or ledgers) you can enter more lines here.
After filling all required information, the contract can be approved and sent to the next activity.
Finance Check
Depending on the application setting “CheckContractByFinance” the contract can be sent to the ‘Finance Check’ activity. In case the setting is set to ‘never’, this step will be skipped and directly send to the next activity. If the setting is set to ‘Always’ it will always go to this specific activity. If the setting is set to ‘VAT/ Ledger missing’ it will only go to this activity when the VAT code or Ledger is missing in the contract lines.
Users with the role “coding” will be the role players for this specific activity. Certain contract fields can be changed and the contract lines can be edited to give them the correct coding parameters. After this the contract can be sent for further approval.
Approval step(s)
Based on the approval matrix mandates, the amount of the contract lines and the total amount, the contract needs to be approved by first/second line approvers and first/second overall approvers. More information on this can be found in the helpfiles of the approval matrix in the ‘maintenance’ manual.
Confirm Contract
After the contract is approved by the correct line/ overall approvers, the contract will be sent to the worklist of the Contract Manager linked in the contract.
Inform initiator
After the contract is confirmed by the contract manager, the contract is sent to the initiator to inform the initiator on the full approval of the contract. This step is skipped, if the contract manager is the same as the initiator.
In all steps it is possible to upload relevant documents by using the Upload button. The most recent document of type ‘supplier contract’ is displayed as the main document linked to the contract transaction.