Contract

Contract registers and describes contractual agreements with a contractual partner.

• A contract in Valuemation is composed of a contract header and contract items. Contract header contains information describing the contract as a whole, i.e. common to all contract items.
• There is always one main contractual partner for a contract specified in the contract header. A contract can also have references to other related contract partners. These may reflect various customer-specific business relationships.
• Each contract has a contract number which can serve the role of as an identifier for internal purposes. Valuemation business key functionality can be used for generating consistent and unique contract numbers.
• If the contract is accompanied also by a "hardcopy" contract in a paper form, some attributes in the contract editor can be used reference it.

• A contract may have none, one or more contract items. A contract item must always have a contract. A contract item can only exist when it belongs to a particular contract and it cannot be assigned to a different one.

Contract: Distinction from Order and Request

While request represents an internal request for the delivery of new IT infrastructure and/or services, both contract and order represent an external request for delivery from a specified business partner.

• Contract has an optional additional relation to Business Partner to specify information not present on order (e.g. billing location). Order, on the other hand, specifies delivery location, which is not present on Contract.
• While Contract Status can be set at any time to any of the pre-defined values, Request and Order Status can be changed only in accordance with defined rules.
• Payments can be uploaded manually only for contracts. To upload payments for orders and requests, an automatic or batch method has to be used.