Contract Categories

Contract Categories   

Contract Categories Planning for Your Contract Insight Application

The Contract Category table is usually used to document a further breakdown or classification of the Contract Types.  However, depending on the type of organization that you work for, you may want to consider using the Contract Categories table for holding large amounts of data/values rather than creating a user-defined field for these values.  While the Contract Types table can affect the Basic Templates and Fields Assigned by Contract Type, the Contract Categories table is not going to affect any other aspect of your Contract Insight application.  The Categories table can be used for searching, reporting, sorting and filtering, as well as for Workflow criteria specifications.  Please keep in mind that while the Contract Categories table is not a mandatory table to be populated, it can be used in many different ways besides simply being a further classification of Contract Types.

With a new installation of Contract Insight, there are several out-of-the-box values provided for you as examples of how this table is usually used. Please keep in mind that while the examples may represent some of the Categories that your organization would like to use, these values can always be edited and deleted if a change to the name of the Category is needed, or if the Category value is not needed at all. Please see the Contract Category Management Documentation Wiki page for more information about adding, editing, and deleting values in the Contract Categories table. See below for some examples of how the Contract Categories table is often used by organizations in different industries.

Some Examples for Consideration:

1.  Hospital/Healthcare Organizations

Many Hospital/Healthcare clients tend to use the Contract Categories table to hold their listing of General Ledger (GL) Codes.  This allows your organization to document for each Contract Record the GL Code that is associated with that particular Contract.

2.  Service/Product Providers

Many Service Providers tend to use the Contract Categories table to hold a list of all of the Products/Services that their organization provides.  This allows your organization to document for each Contract Record the particular Service or Product that the Contract Record is for.

3.  State/County/Government Clients

Many Government agencies tend to use the Contract Categories table to hold a list of all of their Commodities.  This allows the agency to document the particular Commodity that the Contract Record would be classified for/into on the Contract Record itself.

4.  General: Basic Templates NOT being used

If you find that your organization will not need to use the Contract Types Basic Templates feature of Contract Insight and will not need to assign unique Contract Type-specific fields to each Contract Type, then an option would be to list a higher level of Contract Types (i.e. License Agreement, Lease Agreement, etc.) into the Contract Types table, and then list the further classifications in the Contract Categories table, such as your "Software", "Property", "Equipment", etc.

Next Steps:

1.  Download and populate the 'Contract Categories Planning' tab in the "InitialSetupTablePlanningSpreadsheets.xlsx".

2. Follow the instructions for implementing the finalized Contract Categories list either on an individual value-by-value basis on the "Contract Category Management" screen, or by using the instructions on the "Bulk Import Data" screen of the Documentation Wiki.