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Defining Customer ContractsPrinting Contracts with Print Orders Simply, each monthly payment is scheduled on the customer's scheduled job screen. In the master job file, CONTRACT INSTALLMENT jobs for each month of the year are available. You can also add down payment jobs if needed. You are free to define the prices of each installment differently. For example, the first installment can be $200.00 and every other installment $100.00. At the end of each billing period you use Office Express' Complete Work features to post the installments to the customer's transaction file. Once posted, your customers are ready to be billed. You are free to define your contracts as you choose, without restrictions. If your installments are every two weeks or every two months it doesn't matter. You'll need to understand the job codes when defining contract installments. Each of the installments is a chargeable job. All jobs that you schedule that are part of the contract are NOT chargeable. You give these jobs one of the note codes depending on whether you want the jobs to print on the invoice or not. Here's a breakdown of a sample contract scheduled along with some jobs. Description Code Price Contract Installment March 0 $200.00 Contract Installment April 0 $100.00 Contract Installment May 0 $100.00 Contract Installment June 0 $100.00 Contract Installment July 0 $100.00 Spring Cleanup 11 $150.00 Lawn Maintenance 11 $23.00 Fertilizer Spring 11 $35.00 Lawn Core Aeration 0 $100.00 There are a few things that need to be mentioned about the chart above. 1. The Installments, March through July, are the charges (Code 0). These are the amounts the customer will be billed for. 2. Notice Spring Cleanup, Lawn maintenance and Fertilizer Spring have prices. These jobs are part of the contract and have been assigned to Code 11. Code 11 prints the job and the date the job was done but does not compute or print the price. Defining the price gives you the ability to keep a record of the price if in the future the job is no longer part of the contract. Also, with the prices defined, you can generate more accurate reports than if you simply made the price $0.00. Defining a price for Code 11 jobs will have no effect on the system as far as customer balances go. 3. Notice the last job, Lawn Core Aeration is assigned Code 0 with a $100.00 price. This means the job is NOT part of the contract. If you do this job, the customer will be changed an additional $100.00 on top their monthly contract total. As you can see, understanding how to manipulate the job codes gives you the ability to meet any scheduling and billing needs. Printing ContractsIf you create your own contract template there are a few things you should know. The Print Order Field Office Express allows you to define the order the jobs print on your contracts. By default, Office Express sorts jobs alphabetically. Because jobs are sorted alphabetically, when you print a contract, Fall Cleanup will print before Spring Cleanup (F comes before S). If you want to control the order in which the jobs print, edit the jobs in your job file and change the Print Order field. The Print Order is a number you assign. The lower numbers will print first while the higher numbers print last. For example, you could assign Fall Cleanup a number like 1000 and assign Spring Cleanup 10. The actual numbers do not matter. As a rule of thumb when assigning print orders, you should space the numbers out like 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60 and so on. This allows you to easily insert new jobs into the print order. For example the new jobs would be 11, 12, 13 and so on. Designing a Contract that Takes Advantage of the Print Orders When designing a new contract you will need to tell Office Express to sort the scheduled jobs by print order. By default, the Office Express Report Engine does no sorting at all. To have the scheduled jobs print in the order of the Print Order field: 1. from the Report Designer, select the File option. Home | Getting Started | Table of Contents | Office Express Basics | Defining the Job File | Creating Customer Templates | |