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Hi,
Is there a way to create a recurring contract/charge without having to do any manual copying or anything? We want to have a monthly /quarterly billing cycle for some items and just want to them auto-renew, create the charge and then sync into Xero where it is billed out from. Cheers, |
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Thank you for posting this.
The batch-copy wizard lets you renew hundreds of contracts for the next billing cycle while automatically adding all related changes, new blocks, etc. You should create Contracts for the Accounts and add Contract-Price Charges, under such Contracts, that will represent the Contract price. The Contract Start/End Dates should be set to reflect the monthly/quarterly billing, for example, from June 1st to August 31th. Then, you can use Batch Copy Contracts wizard that lets you to renew any number of Contracts with only a few clicks for the next period. All Charges, that were logged as Price Charges, are automatically copied to the new date, so you do not need to manually recreate them. You can then use the QuickBooks or Xero Batch Invoicing Wizard to generate any number of Invoices with only a few clicks! Please find some useful links: Contract-Price Charges Recurring Contracts Batch Invoicing to Xero Hope this helps. |
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Let me add a request that CommitCRM is improved to avoid this workaround. IMHO this turned out to be a poor operational implementation of recurring revenue, and doesn't let us effectively use CommitCRM to manage contract renewals etc.
Having contracts expire artificially at the billing period is not helpful to use CommitCRM as the true source of truth for data. If my customer signed a 1, 2 or 3 year contract, then I want THAT date reflected in the contract expiration, NOT the billing period. Why not add a billing period field to make this reflect the actual contract configuration? This also causes all sorts of problems with our technicians seeing "expired contracts" ALL the time when you have to set the expiration to the billing cycle. It is very misleading and inaccurate when we had to use this method. We also found that we had to manually re-order the invoicing data (from Commit, before pushing) to make it "appear" visually correctly in Quickbooks, and there didn't appear to be a good way to "SAVE" the order of billed contract items, so they are grouped together logically for our customers. We moved away from billing our recurring contract directly from CommitCRM because of this, and instead use memorized transactions, and then have to manually use our own auditing tools to adjust counts/numbers in QuickBooks, which is certainly less than ideal. I would very much like to move back to auto-pushing recurring contract invoices directly from CommitCRM, but it needs some serious improvement for that to be viable for us. |
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We ran into the same issue. We worked around it by setting the contract end dates to the billing date (monthly in our case), and using the batch renewal feature. We place the actual signed contract end dates in the contract description field. This lets them show up in the contract list so that we can see which customers are actually due for a contract renewal. We do not auto-renew contracts, we make our customers sign a renewal agreement.
It would be convenient if there were separate billing end date and contract end date fields. That way we could sort or possibly get reminders/reports on contract end dates so that we know who needs renewal agreements drawn up. The other problem we run into with contracts is the overage. Most of our contracts are block of time -- e.g. 6 hours per month. If that customer uses 10 hours in the month, we need options on what to do with the 4 overage hours. 1) Bill them for those hours, possibly at a custom hourly rate, 2) roll them into the next billing period, 3) split them out to a project contract, etc. Right now, we have to pull a report at the end of the month, determine who is in overage, and then manually add an overage charge to each of those customers. This is a pain. |
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I also agree about the reordering of data part. As it is there is no good way to set the order of the charged items when creating an invoice. If you create the invoice through a batch you are stuck with whatever arbitrary order it gives. If you can create the invoice manually you can reorder it. But this reorder only applies to that invoice and must be done each time an invoice is created. It would be very helpful to be able to set the order somehow to be able to keep it. Otherwise we end up with very disorganized invoices that are difficult for a client to read.
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We do not use any of the automated features and only use contract price charges as a guideline to ensure we invoice everything correctly from Quickbooks. We changed from a more advanced accounting system to QB (which IMHO is very rudimentary) for the automation which is far from ideal. +1 for all the above
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