Background on Contract Rates
A Contract Charge is made up of one or more Contract Rates, each rate being for a separate Agent, either Service or Finance.
As well Contract Rates are historic, by that I mean they have an Effective From date, such that over the life of the Contract we might record several service rates, with different effective dates, the first from the date the contract was started, the second 12 months later being the first increase.
By default, when viewing a Contract Charge, only the Current effective rates are shown, to see the historic rates press the button with 3 lines - the button will only appear if there are multiple rates
Default view
Expanded historic view
Normally, you would only ever increase the Service Rate, Finance Rates by default are not increased.
Contract Setting for Scheduled Increases
On the New Contract form, or subsequently on the Edit Contract form, you can modify the Increase Frequency. This is used for applying automatic rate increases on a set schedule.
month
quarter
trimester
half-year
nine-month
year
none
The most common selections are 'none' or 'year'.
Subsequently on the Edit form, you can also change the Next Increase On date, which is initially set based on the Contract Start date and Increase Frequency, then updated whenever a scheduled Rate Increase is applied.
Contract Charge Increase Settings
Within each Contract Charge are fields for Increase Percentage and Increase Basis.
Increase Percentage is just the % you want the increase to be on the current rate.
Increase Basis has options for Revenue or Service.
Revenue calculates the increase based both the finance and service components of the contract charge, whilst Service bases the increase only on the Service component.
Either way, the increase is only applied to the Service component.
As an example, a 5% increase on Revenue, might be the same increase as 15% on Service.
Automatic Scheduled Rate Increases
Because you're normally required to notify a customer of a rate increase, BMS does this with a message on the Invoice for the Billing Period prior to the scheduled rate increase.
For BMS to be aware that an increase is due, the new rate must be generated prior to that billing period's transaction being generated.
For Monthly billings, the increase would have to have been generated (as a future rate) at the beginning of the previous month. However, for Quarterly billings, it would have to be generated 3 months before.
The system runs a Scheduled Task at the beginning of each month to generate rate increases due within 3 months. This function can also be run from Billing/Contracts/Manage Contracts/Apply Rate Increases.
Contract Rate Manual Increase
Within a Contract Charge are one or many Rates. As discussed previously each rate has buttons on the right to show the Rate History and another to generate a manual Rate Increase seperate from the scheduled increase.
Adding a manual Rate Increase allows you to set a rate increase to apply outside of the scheduled increases. You have fields for the Percentage Increase, the Unit Price and the Date to apply it from.