Halo Implementation Series – Contracts/Agreements – Video 13

hey everyone and welcome to another uh installment in our halo implementation series with me today I have um you know what I'm all gonna what I'm gonna say at this point um I have my favorite person at Halo um Mr Halo himself the legendary Legend of all legends Mr Morgan aspinal so hey how you doing Morgan hey mate how's it going actually uh some customers have started catching on now I've had had a couple of occasions where I've hopped on a caller and they've said oh it's Mr Halo so yeah uh word is spreading absolutely your your reputation procedes you right which is great yeah yeah yeah I can't complain no exactly exactly and I I'll always um I'll always say that about you mate because uh you know um of of anyone I know that knows Halo you you literally are Mr Halo so and and always appreciate you you helping me with these uh these videos So today we're going to talk about agreements what they are when to use them um and then we're going to follow on um with that to talk about some labor billing which we'll probably do as a separate video um and then talk about building plan combinations and this is following on from what we did last time where you know we specifically talked about recurring invoices so in this one we're going to say you know what is an agreement how does it work when to use them all of that kind of stuff yeah absolutely uh and it is advised that before we dive into agreements uh the previous video has been watched because it's very important that we're building on uh what we've discussed previously uh and so without further Ado let's jump in that's great absolutely so we saw in the last session the concept of our recurring invoices now it's important to bear in mind that what we were referring to there is nothing more than invoices for you know products or Services you know like licenses and so on um to be billed on a scheduled basis however the other component to that would be uh the support side so you might sell uh you might sell licenses you might sell Hardware you probably also support that hardware and support those applications and it is the agreements that allow us to specify that labor time on tickets would be consumed by the uh the allotted time that you have that you have agreed with the customer so um we set our agreements up in our agreements module where in here of course with everything else if you want to create a new agreement click new in the top right yeah and while you're doing that I just wanted to say so like for um you know for anyone that's coming in from all the tasks or one of those other tools this is basically what we're talking about here is contracts um so you know it does it pretty much the same way but instead of having recurring invoices you know what it's us for example would have um services and you'd attach those Services into the contract but the contract is really where you're going to be billing that labor you're going to be billing um you know setting your slas determining you know whether an SLA is included or not that kind of thing so this essentially in in Halo an agreement is is the contract side of it um and then that eventually ties into the recurring invoices yeah yeah that's it uh cool so I like to think of uh further to that point I like to think of agreements or contracts I mean the the phrase agreement slash contraction Halo is interchangeable and so I like to think of agreements in Halo as recurring invoices with some additional information sort of wrapped around them and that additional information as you mentioned Chris might include the SLA that's applicable to this agreement uh the number of hours each month that's included in this agreement that kind of stuff yeah so we we start to build that all out by populating the details uh from the details tab first performance you pick our customer we pick our unique agreement reference or we let Halo generate one for you we pick our labor type here so agreements can have two different labor types fixed or prepay fixed labor type is use it or lose it type functionality um so if our labor type is fixed then what we will find below is we will find this hours per period option and this hours per period is going to say how many hours per period are covered by this agreement so you might have an agreement with a customer whereby they get 24 hours of support included but as soon as you go over those 24 hours you go into hour 25 then time thereafter for the month would be billable and then it comes to the end of the month and that resets and they've got another 24 hours and if the customer doesn't use those 24 hours in the month then it just gets reset again next month that's not that's not something that's going to be carrying over let's say and when you when you mentioned per yeah so you were just about to go on to that so um when you're mentioning the um yeah period That's that labor period right where your your mouse yes at the moment so that is yeah yeah x amount of hours per month per year per quarter whatever it is yes yeah um it's also worth noting that if the agreement is an all you can eat agreement and you've got this unlimited checkbox here which just means that you know it is all you think yeah the other labor type is free pay uh we'll come back to this shortly effectively our prepay agreements allow us to add in prepay records into the agreement and that might happen one-off well that might happen on a recurring basis and then what we can do with that as well is we can have those hours carry over to the following month so it might be that we set up a prepay agreement that tops the prepay bucket up by four hours each month and one of those four hours actually carries over to the next month uh so just to sort of add a buffer in there but we'll see how that how that looks but that's that's basically block block hours and blocks of time whatever it is is free plan yeah um so let's set up a fixed agreement let's set our labor period as monthly um we'll see here we can set a start date and an end date of our agreements obviously start date default to today the end date can be either a number of periods so again we might want a 36 month agreement here so I could just put 36 in there it might be that we want to specify an end date again being a bit more flexible as to precisely when the the end date will occur or no end date so the agreement is just rolling on in perpetuity uh below the those options we have our contracts hype field so this is uh effectively the category of agreement I like to think of these different agreement types as your sort of your managed Services your um backup you know that those those different types of agreements we would have as options in here and this is reportable so this is basically then you can say hey I want to know how much revenue I've made on gold managed Services contracts or how much yeah how much are silver contracts are costing us which ones aren't profitable that kind of stuff yes yeah absolutely and the options in this drop down are configurable and we can set those in configuration [Music] billing contract types you'll notice here it says contract types agreements in Halo used to be called contracts there are you know there's the occasional phrase here and there that you'll see referred to as contracts it means they are the same thing and we can see that because the drop downs in here are the drop downs that we just saw on our agreement so we can set up new agreement types um or you know make use for the existing ones cool um again for sort of further clarifying exactly what type of agreement this is we have our subtype here um where we can specify managed unmanaged I believe that the those options are in advanced settings so a very quick look so maybe not it might be that those are hard-coded um 100 sure where those options are actually coming from but that's because I've never had to go beyond this and managed unmanage the tend to be the most commonly used yeah and those aren't required Fields anyway so you know it's not like you have to absolutely fill them in if you want to leave them leave them out then leave them out correct yeah yeah um and below that we can specify an SLA to be attributed to tickets when disagreement is the agreement that has been added on to the ticketing question and then below that just a couple of options around the PDF template the email address to to use for uh sending the agreement it's probably worth mentioning before we go any further just to touch on that topic because this is a question that comes up quite a lot whereby people are looking to find a way to send the agreements out to their customers for signing um now we don't do that because the signature portion of the process happens at the quotation proposal stage so we'll remember in previous video when we were going through the CRM flow we saw the ability for customers to sign proposals and we also saw how from the subsequent sales order that has been created we have the ability to perform those actions on sales orders one of which is to create an agreement and we'll probably come back to this when we start looking at some more worked examples start to end process type sessions but in there we'll see how we start with the art we sign the proposal and then from the sales order we create the agreement and then that way while the signature isn't on the agreement document it is all linked back to the original signature that the customer sign so yeah I just wanted to highlight that cool so we filled our details in click save and that's our agreement created now an important consideration Point here is we've just created our agreement awesome however there is another very important step that we need to take to make sure that we're actually getting paid now that is create our recurring invoices right so in the previous session I said that it is very important when creating your recurring invoices to set your schedule because if you don't set your schedule for your recurring invoice you never get paid well similarly when you're creating your agreements you want to make sure that you're creating recurring invoices for them because again if you don't you're not going to get paid um there are Fringe cases where you might want to create an agreement as a container for information but not have an Associated recurring invoice but for the majority of use cases you will want to create a recurring invoice when creating an agreement and I think interesting thing to to think about here is that you know the agreement itself is it doesn't do any billing right you have to have the recurring invoices attached to that agreement in order for it to do any kind of billing right and I see this quite a lot as people set up agreements and then go well why is why is nothing billing and that's because they haven't added the recurring invoices element to that um and and then also having set up the schedule so that it goes and actually um bills on a monthly basis so bear that in mind you know when you're setting these things up is that um it has to have recurring invoices in order to do the billing because that's actually what does the billing so to speak yeah because I believe in Auto tasks as you said at the start of the session I think in Auto task what we what we call recurring invoices Auto tasks calls contracts no they call that services so right you basically it's the same thing you can set up a contract without without services but it's about as useful as a chocolate teapot because it's kind of you know it's it does it does nothing it doesn't build anything you need to have the services um and those Services then will be billed and and you know invoices will be created from those services so I guess it's the same thing here you know this is just a a shell because you know here we said all labor is included um so we're gonna we're gonna track all the labor against this but we're not actually going to bill the 365 or back up or antivirus or whatever against this we're not going to have any labor elements we're going to have nothing as it stands right here until we add recurring invoices to us yeah yeah so similar to how you would want to consider adding services to contracts in Auto tasks you would want to consider creating a recurring invoice against an agreement in Halo yeah um now what I like to and this uh this option that I'm about to mention should be enabled by default in new trials but for older versions you might find that that you need to go and enable this feature level to mention um and that is that feature is to automatically create or automatically open up the recurring invoice screen upon creating an agreement because I I completely see where people come from when they're like they okay I've just created this so I now have to remember to go over to my recurring invoices Tab and click new uh that's not gonna happen you know I'm going to go through I've got my accounts team creating 200 300 contracts uh 300 agreements they're not going to remember to do that every time so what you want to make sure you have enabled is an option in configuration agreements or configuration contracts whereby you um have this option here create new recurring invoice after creating an agreement so we'll turn that on we'll go back to our agreement section and create a new agreement now while you're doing that as well just to bear in mind if you tick that box it doesn't actually whether you select um prepaid as well or not so at this point you actually don't need to create the recurring invoices for prepaid because that's a slightly different agreement type um and that bills the the blocks but that thing still pops up for you to create the the agreement schedule when you have um uh you know prepaid blocks as well so and that um that pop-up that you're referring to is what we're about to see in a moment notice how this time when I click save we are automatically redirected to the recurring invoice schedule screen and this should be a familiar screen if you've just come from watching the previous video around recurring invoices it is exactly the same configuration here a couple of points to note the schedule for the recurring invoice has been inherited from the start date repeat period and end date for the agreement however they don't have to be the same so you might have agreements set up whereby the customer has 90 hours each quarter of support included but that is build monthly or they've got 240 hours over the year but it's billed monthly so you can make sure that your labor period for your agreement is yearly annual but then when you're creating your recurring invoice schedule you can change that to monthly so just because we're inheriting that schedule doesn't mean they must necessarily be the same and then beyond that this is just a recurring invoice screen so everything that we saw in the last session is applicable here the only difference really is we have this agreement option that is not n a but is in fact the agreement that we have just created so again we've got our schedule set up we can add our additional lines I might want to add to any uh items issued to this particular document when it's sent this particular invoice when it's generated and I go in I add my recurring invoice lines so I've got my business premium six lows got a SSL cert as well save that save that and that's it so that's it in its most basic form at least um so we now have our agreement and from that we have our Associated recurring invoice um so yeah I think that's a good place to leave this as an introduction to our agreements um well when we come back and have a look at a bit more detail we'll start to see the um the application of our charge types tab um our assets and users our periodic history as well this is an important one um but it makes more sense to come back to these once we have an understanding of the other side of billing in Halo and that is labor belief that we will be covering next and before we do that though just one thing to to mention and I I've heard this a couple of times so it'd be good to get your take on it but with um the prepaid we can add prepaid without having an agreement um so we've prepaid hours and having prepaid as part of an agreement um the the prepaid under an agreement is now the new way to do it in in Halo and not using the the prepaid the old way sure can you kind of explain the the reasons we would put a chair under the um yes absolutely so um we haven't covered free pay yet so uh without sort of I'll I'll try and be as general as possible and we will we will take a look when we're looking at billing um you know over the next few videos we will take a look at prepay uh but just to provide some context there before we had so we didn't always have this labor type option in agreements uh when the group when agreement functionality was first developed in Halo uh all agreements were only of type fixed there wasn't an option anything um however we did have prepay functionality and that prepaid functionality was set at client level now that works fine and actually we'll see when we come back to prepay we'll see that all of the options in the client level three pay tab everything in here is actually the same as everything we see in the free pay tab for an agreement so let me very quickly just create a prepay agreement save that get redirected to my recurring invoice schedule screen I'm just going to close that quickly just to demonstrate that our prepay agreements have this prepay Tab and this prepay tab has the same information as what we saw a moment ago at client level um the difference is the client level prepaid is singular one client could only have one bucket of prepay time yeah so uh however that you know so so we couldn't really handle cases whereby uh you know a customer an msps customer has got several different buckets of time that are all chipping away uh but do need to you know carry over to the following month let's say um so to handle the ability for One customer to have multiple buckets of prepay time we added the functionality to uh of prepaid agreements which is basically taking everything that we had in here and moving it into the rooms into an agreement yeah I hope that makes sense yeah yeah it does and it you know that question gets asked a lot I normally just direct people into the the agreements to set up prepay when they when they set those up um yeah you know because then everything else is is tracked as part of that agreement um but there are you know there is that other option where you could you could just use it from the client level at that point um we will cover that off yes yeah for sure we'll take we will have a dedicated session to prepay and we'll see the how it's almost identical uh when setting up a client level was when setting up in an agreement and I I would also agree for the sake of consistency uh I would use i instead of adding prepay at client level which is more of a legacy method of adding prepay I would create an agreement of Labor type prepay and use it in there instead just for because of that point of you know maybe at some at some point in the future you'll need to add a second bucket of prepaid time in at that point you don't want to have to look at the client level and dinner agreement you you want to have those two agreements in the same place and it yeah it just helps helps with the understanding and keeping things consistent yeah and that happens with me quite a lot because I you know I do a lot of prepaid billing and so from my point of view it's it's much easier to do it this way because then you know when we run out of the bucket of time and and they top it up I can just go into into the agreement and just just add yeah just increase the the extra bucket yeah and just go into the prepay record and so yeah it's um so that's the way I would always recommended I just knew I had that question a couple of times people have asked me um so I thought it would be good to put it out and videos so that everyone looking at it will uh we'll kind of um you know hear the same thing so um but I really appreciate it that's a great video and as you say good good place to leave it and I think what we'll do on the next video then is we'll cover off labor billing so we'll talk about you know how to build for that um and then you briefly touched on the charge types um and yeah building plan combinations and stuff so we'll talk about those on separate videos as well so um thank you very much Morgan really appreciate it and as always appreciate um Halo allowing us to do these and you know letting me uh borrow your time so I really appreciate it and um look forward to seeing you on the next video always a pleasure yeah thanks Chris and thanks everyone for watching cheers