A contract is for the customer you go to every week. It holds their sites, how often you go, and the rate you agreed, so nobody has to remember what this customer pays or which of their sites is on the round.
Once it is on, the rates come through onto the jobs and onto the invoices on their own, which is where most of the value is. Rates agreed twelve months ago tend not to be the rates that get charged.
How to do it
In the sidebar, under Operations, click Contracts.
Click New contract. If the customer accepted a quote, open the quote and click Convert to contract instead, and the pricing comes across.
Under Parties, search for the producer. If they have more than one site, tick every site the contract covers, and give each one its own days and frequency if the round is not the same everywhere.
Under Schedule, set the frequency: Weekly, Fortnightly, Monthly, Quarterly or Ad-hoc. Pick the days of the week you go.
Set the start date, and the end date if there is one. Leave the end date blank for a rolling contract, or set one and tick auto-renew.
Under Pricing, add the lines that make up each visit. Every line needs a description. These lines are copied onto every job the contract raises, and each job can still be adjusted on its own afterwards.
Under Service & SLA, put your response time and anything the team needs to know in the notes, and add the customer's PO number and the PO document if they have sent one over.
Click Activate contract. Save draft if you are still agreeing it.
Worth knowing
The list shows each contract's site, frequency, value and expiry date at a glance, and the tabs across the top narrow it to Active, Pending, Ending soon, Ended, Draft or Cancelled.
Changing the pricing lines later affects future jobs only. Jobs already on the schedule keep the price they were created with, which is what stops a rate change quietly rewriting work you have already done.
A contract can cover several sites for the same customer, so a builder with four sites is one contract rather than four.
Contract rates beat your standard price book, so the customer gets what they were promised without anyone remembering to check.
A contract with no pricing lines on it is a legitimate way to work. It still raises the jobs, and you price each one when it is done.
If you set a response time on the contract, LoadSnap warns you when a job is being booked beyond it. The clock starts when the job is raised, and the deadline is that many hours later. The warning only shows when the earliest the collection could happen is already past that deadline, so a day that still has hours left on it stays quiet and you are only told about a booking that genuinely cannot be met. It appears on the job form as you pick the date, and on the job itself afterwards.
Related: How Contracts work in LoadSnap. How to create a quote. How to raise and send an invoice.