2015 TPC: Create quotes for contracts and agreements.

[Guest]

At the 2015 Tigerpaw Partner Conference in Omaha I shared the top requested roadmap items with almost 500 Tigerpaw partners. I'm posting all of the items here as individual feature requests to spark a dialog, and to allow you all a chance to set the priority for our dev team through your votes.


Thanks for helping us take Tigerpaw to the next level!


Feature Request:

Currently, you can create a quote that can be turned into a work order or a service order. We've been asked to allow you to create a quote that can be turned into a contract or recurring agreement. For example, you could quote an MSP agreement and have Tigerpaw create the agreement automatically upon acceptance form your client.

[droark]

Yes, this would be awesome!

[robert.brack@wearepriority.com]

It would be even better if you could quote an MSP price directly from a hardware quote. In our business, we include the first year of support/MSP in our pricing model, then bill for the second year at 11 months. Many clients want to know the second year price before they purchase the equipment, so we always include it on our quotes. Today, we manually calculate the MSP price and hand write it on the quote. It would be great if we could have the option of including the MSP price for the second year on all of our quotes in addition to providing a stand-alone MSP quote.

[PavelComm]

Yes this would be awesome. We use a Tigerpaw quote for contract adjustments and It be awesome to have one created then it converts to a contract and/or an agreement. then if it out the assets on the contract with costs would also be sweet. 2 thumbs up from me

[Guest]

Hi Robert,

Can you expand a bit on what you'd like to see? Perhaps walk us through what it might look like if it were done today?

thanks!

[JCR]

While I was a big fan for this enhancement back in 2009 when we went live with TP, I no longer see a benefit to this enhancement based on the following:

1. TP licensing is segmented by Pursuit, Parts, Service, Quotes. Unless you purchase Quotes licenses for your support team, they will no longer have knowledge as to if a contract quote was generated or not when the info in needed by the support team.
2. Having used TP since 2009, it's great having the entire contract history of a given account all in one place. We use this daily. We heavily rely on all of the 20+ different Contract Status we've setup, two of which are "Quote - Not Signed" and "Quote - Signed Waiting Activation"
3. With exception to having to use back track to add "Labor" type items to a contract, everything can be easily managed from Quoting, to Activating, or Renewing, or Holding, or canceling contracts all from one place. Having some info here and other info there, which may not be able to be accessed, based on what your system is licensed for and what modules you are logging or not logging into could cause pain for some individuals not having access to information when needed.
4. It would require extra work and labor when renewing an existing contract for another term, which needed to be price adjusted and processed as a Quote. It's faster to click renew and then make the minor adjustments needed and change the quote status accordingly.
5. When the account is contacting us for service, there is only one place we need to look to know if a given contract is still in quote status or activated, cancelled, etc.
6. Having Contract renewal history and hidden General notes all in one place is very beneficial.
7. We have a lot of serialized items included on contracts which is easily available from the customer assets to include on the quotes. With the proposed enhancement, would the user need to be licensed and logged into the Service module as well in order to have access to the customer assets to add serialized items on the Quote module to quote a contract?

These are just some things to consider when working with Contracts.

There are limitations in Contracts that could be beneficial from using the Quoting license. Maybe these items below could be enhanced in the current Service module for contracts.

1. In Quotes, more characters could be used for the contract verbiage. There needs to be more characters available for the "Includes" section of Contracts. We are not able to get the verbiage that we need to fit in the Includes section.
2. This verbiage would need to be reproduced and printed, emailed to a customer for any Contract created in the Quote module that was converted to the Service module. All of this would need to be accessed from the Service module.
3. Current pain point with Contracts is that nothing is logged when someone changes a contract status to one of the 20+ status we have. With this enhancement, at least a log would be generated when someone would convert a contract quoted from the Quote module to the Service module and you would know who the person was and when they did it. Not logging changes to a given Contract's status within the Service module is a big pain point that needs to be addressed.

[Rudy Jivaraj]

Hi,

Thanks for your response and feedback. We are working on the initial design and we will reach out to you to gather more details. We can determine if a CAG meeting if needed at that time to expand on the feature. Meanwhile if you have additional inputs feel free to post it to this forum.

Thanks,
Rudy

[Marsha Blobaum]

These are great points that need to be considered int he design phase of implementing this feature. I'd like to discuss with you further as we plan the design. Can I reach out to you directly when we get to that phase of planning?

While I was a big fan for this enhancement back in 2009 when we went live with TP, I no longer see a benefit to this enhancement based on the following:

1. TP licensing is segmented by Pursuit, Parts, Service, Quotes. Unless you purchase Quotes licenses for your support team, they will no longer have knowledge as to if a contract quote was generated or not when the info in needed by the support team.
2. Having used TP since 2009, it's great having the entire contract history of a given account all in one place. We use this daily. We heavily rely on all of the 20+ different Contract Status we've setup, two of which are "Quote - Not Signed" and "Quote - Signed Waiting Activation"
3. With exception to having to use back track to add "Labor" type items to a contract, everything can be easily managed from Quoting, to Activating, or Renewing, or Holding, or canceling contracts all from one place. Having some info here and other info there, which may not be able to be accessed, based on what your system is licensed for and what modules you are logging or not logging into could cause pain for some individuals not having access to information when needed.
4. It would require extra work and labor when renewing an existing contract for another term, which needed to be price adjusted and processed as a Quote. It's faster to click renew and then make the minor adjustments needed and change the quote status accordingly.
5. When the account is contacting us for service, there is only one place we need to look to know if a given contract is still in quote status or activated, cancelled, etc.
6. Having Contract renewal history and hidden General notes all in one place is very beneficial.
7. We have a lot of serialized items included on contracts which is easily available from the customer assets to include on the quotes. With the proposed enhancement, would the user need to be licensed and logged into the Service module as well in order to have access to the customer assets to add serialized items on the Quote module to quote a contract?

These are just some things to consider when working with Contracts.

There are limitations in Contracts that could be beneficial from using the Quoting license. Maybe these items below could be enhanced in the current Service module for contracts.

1. In Quotes, more characters could be used for the contract verbiage. There needs to be more characters available for the "Includes" section of Contracts. We are not able to get the verbiage that we need to fit in the Includes section.
2. This verbiage would need to be reproduced and printed, emailed to a customer for any Contract created in the Quote module that was converted to the Service module. All of this would need to be accessed from the Service module.
3. Current pain point with Contracts is that nothing is logged when someone changes a contract status to one of the 20+ status we have. With this enhancement, at least a log would be generated when someone would convert a contract quoted from the Quote module to the Service module and you would know who the person was and when they did it. Not logging changes to a given Contract's status within the Service module is a big pain point that needs to be addressed.