Contract Management

A Contract is a document which represents the agreement between two (or more) parties. This agreements have different clauses that are represented as contract terms.

In order to represent a contract, we must know its related party, an internal code, a external reference, the agreement date and a list of clauses which will be a text and a sequence to order them.

The contract can be in one of the following states:

  • Draft
  • Proposal
  • Accepted
  • Running
  • Finished
  • Canceled

Implementation:

https://bugs.tryton.org/issue5760

I need such a function.
May I suggest also
A contract is made from a contract template
A contract has some particular conditions
A contract can be modified while already Running
A contract can be suspended and reactivated.
A contract can be automatically renewed or in deadline alert for renewal.

doe’s it make sens ?

I also thought about it, as you normally have some types of contracts, but this can be achieved by using a draft contract as template and duplicating it. Also it can be implemented as a separate module if you have more complex templating requirements.

IIUC particular conditions → some extra term lines.

Why not using a new contract? Which kinds of modifications do you need? For example, i don’t think we should allow terms modification while running.

I thinks this can be implemented by a third party module, as we don’t talk about start/end dates of contract in base modules. BTW, normally contractas are autorenewed automatically, so I don’t know if it makes much sense to include start/end date fields

P.S: Thanks for your comments!

may be we have two options

  • start with a subset of what contract management is in a simplified design then add features as custom
  • start with universal contract management concepts in a standardized design and then add specific custom behaviors.

I favour the second because first one reminds me Odoo too much, but this is an open discussion and I will listen everybody and probably the right thing to do is in-between the two options.

On the different contracts I deal with (either because I’m vendor or customer) I see many concepts that Tryton would be good at.
Examples
in telephony, when I agree on new pricing it becomes effective but I keep my contract and options.
in my insurance, I can declare a new driver of my car, it is an amendment, not a new contract.
A service provider proposed to suspend the service during my holidays
when a customer complains, I can offer him to extend the duration of the contract for free as a compensation

If we choose option 1, then probably we will have several contract modules to cover different cases.
If we could find a generic, basic way to implement generic case, then many kinds of contract management could be built over it.

Any opinion ?

For me, an important design feature is that contract lines often need to refer to other lines.
For this, I think a good design will be that the line will be just link to template line which contain the text with a simple template language that render the other line paragraph number.

Great so we can also use the customer/copmany variable to be rendered on the clauses.

Just to clarify:

  • Are you suggesting to add Contract Templates or only Lines templates?
  • The link between lines and template lines is required. Isn’t it?
  • Do you suggest to automatically numerate the paragraph (clauses) or what do you understand by paragraph number?

Yes. Indeed I think each template line should define a list of dict keys that it uses. And on the contract, we use the all list of keys to fill a Dict field. Of course some common field will be real fields like date, company etc.

The main addition is the line templates but adding a contract template is the natural next step.

I think it should. I do not think it is a good practice to write contract clause per contract. Normally, they should be verified by lawyers.

Yes I think we could automatically enumerate paragraph. And probably it will be good to use a tree structure (with some line being titles).

Provably you can take some ideas from NaN’s contract module: https://bitbucket.org/nantic/trytond-contract

Here is the proposed implementation:

https://bugs.tryton.org/issue5760

How do you see the interaction with sales? add a new type of product : ‘contract’?
how to materialize its delivery to the customer and therefore billing?

Amendments to current contracts are similar as to amendments to purchase/sales [contracts].
BTW: in any case, there needs to be means to create new lines as new clauses can be contracted in any amendment.