Contract management and managing subscriptions

Contract management means keeping track of agreements that run over a longer period. For each contract you want to know who the customer is, what was agreed, what it costs per period, when it starts, when the next invoice is due and when it ends. For a service firm that is a service contract. For a wholesaler it is a supply agreement with regular call-off. For a software supplier it is a subscription.

The heart of subscription billing is that the invoicing repeats itself. You record the agreement once, and the recurring invoices then follow at the agreed rhythm, without anyone creating a new invoice each time. You stay in control by watching when the next invoice falls due and by deciding in time on renewal or termination.

The contract itself, with its terms, duration and notice period, belongs in most small companies not in the accounts but in a document or in your CRM. The books mainly watch the financial side, which is what you invoice, when and to whom. If you also want to guard renewals, notice periods and the content of the agreements, that usually happens outside the ERP.

An example. A service firm has around a dozen customers with a service contract, each with its own fixed amount per period. Instead of creating a dozen invoices by hand in every period, it records each contract once as a repeating agreement. The question then shifts from how do I make the invoice to is the contract still right. That second question is one you ask a few times a year, not at every invoicing run. It leaves time for the conversation with the customer.

Three things matter when you set this up. Record for each customer what the period and the end date are. Decide who is responsible for reviewing rates. And agree how you handle a customer who cancels or changes halfway through a period, because that is the moment when repeating invoices produce the most mistakes.

We do not describe a separate contract management module for Uniconta. What Uniconta does have is recurring invoicing on sales orders. You can set up subscriptions on a sales order, after which they are invoiced automatically. For several customers at once you can use bulk invoicing. For this Uniconta works with repeating orders, with fields for the repetition, the next invoice and the end date of the subscription.

In practice this means you can manage a subscription as a repeating sales order. You see when the next sales invoice follows and when the subscription ends. A credit note is created from a posted invoice. What we have not confirmed, and therefore do not promise, is contract documents, indexation of rates and alerts for renewals.

On the purchasing side Uniconta also has recurring purchase orders for subscriptions and service contracts, so you can track your own ongoing costs in the same way, see purchasing. If you have contracts that need more than a repeating order, we agree beforehand what fits.