What is a Contract Template and how do I create one?
Contracts in PSOhub also serves as the structure for booking time and expenses as well as performing invoicing. Templates are simply pre-defined contract structures that you can leverage when creating a project(s). They consist of groups and contract lines.
Important: A contract in PSOhub is the financial agreement that has been signed-off between your customer and your organization. The financials can come from an offer, proposal, or statement of work (SOW), highlighting line by line, what has been offered, the costs and payment terms.
Note: A contract template will save you time when building the same type of projects for customers using the same contract layout. By creating a template, you can insert it in as many projects using the same contract layout and billing types.
To create a contract template, in the main menu, click the Gear icon:
Next, in the left-hand menu, select Templates and Contract Templates:
Out of the box, PSOhub offers a list of standard contract templates to choose from and modify according to your own organization. But you can also create one from a "blank slate" by clicking Create:
The following dialog box appears:
As instructed, create a name for your contract template (e.g., Marketing contract) that describes your business contract for specific customer projects. Then, click Save.
The newly created contract template appears:
Contracts are made of building blocks or groupings of products and/services that have been sold to your customer. Within the building blocks/groupings are contract lines that define the product/service, it's cost and billing type (Fixed fee, Time & Expenses, Expense or Retainer).
To build out your contract, click the Add new line button and the Contract line template dialog box appears:
To create the building blocks/ groupings, click the Groups button.
Next, click the Add new group button:
Click the Add new group button. Here, you can add as many building blocks/ groupings as required to match the official quote, proposal or statement of work.
In the below example, we are creating three building blocks for a marketing contract: Promotional video, Brand refresh and Expenses:
To add a new group(s), click Add new group. To delete a group, click the trash bin button.
Note: The numbering of the groups are for filtering purposes, so that in reporting you can filter a contract group and see all the contract lines belonging to it. The number is configured by default with increments of 10. Should you wish to create your own numbering in the event you have complex contracts with multiple lines, you can modify them in the Project settings under Contract group numbers.
When you have finished adding the groups, click Close to return to the Contract line template dialog box. Here, you will see the contract groups in the Group drop-down list.
Close the dialog box, by clicking on the X button to see the structure or framework of your contract as shown below. The contract groups are present and underneath the contract lines or the financial details of the line item costings are to be defined. To define the line items, click Add new line:
From here, you can enter the name of your contract line. In this example, we are entering the line item, Storyboarding and adding it to the contract group 10 - Promotional video.
The pre-defined values, such as the Description, billing Type, Amount and Budget (Sales) can be carried over to the project when you select the template. This is however, not mandatory and the related fields can be left empty:
If the contract line is a Fixed fee you can already specify a default Amount (e.g. contract line related to Storyboarding may always be the same fee) as well as a default Budget (Sales) and Budget (Costs). These fields can be overwritten at Project level in either the Contract or Estimated Profitability views.
Note: Whenever you enter a value in the Amount field of a Fixed Fee, it is automatically copied over to the Budget (Sales) field.
If the contract line is T&M (Time & Material) you can already specify a default Budget (Sales) and Budget (Costs) amounts which can be overwritten at Project level.
If the contract line is an Expense you can also specify a Budget (Sales) and Budget (Costs) amount at Template level.
If the contract line is a Retainer you can specify an amount and Budget (Sales) and Budget (Costs) at Template level.
Finally it is possible to define a contract line as Not Active; this means that when you create a project and set it up as Active, that contract line will remain "not active" and will not be available for time/expense entry until you manually set it up as Active.
If the Display estimate on quote (budget) is selected, your internal estimate/budget for work to be carried is visible in a customer Quote.
Note that each contract group may only have a maximum of 20 contract lines. If you require more than 20 contract lines in your template, please make use of contract groups.
Click Save and repeat the steps for each contract line, until your contract is complete:
Next step
If you are in the process of setting up your organization in PSOhub, your next step will be to complete the Invoice settings (even if you connect PSOhub with your back end financial solution).
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