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What are Master and Child contracts
What are Master and Child contracts

How Master and Child contracts work and what you can use them for

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Written by Contract Eagle
Updated over a week ago

Audience: Standard Users

Why use Master and Child contracts

Master and Child contracts allow you to actively link two or more contracts together in your contract repository. If you subsequently search for a contract, Contract Eagle makes it easy to see its related contracts. 

Pre-requisites

  1. First, Master and Child contracts must have a common counterparty. It may be that each contract you are looking to link has multiple counterparties, but at least one of those parties needs to be common to create a Master and Child relationship between contracts.

  2. Secondly, both contracts must be of a type that allows the creation of a Master or Child relationship. Depending on the configuration of your database, this may be disabled in one or both contract types. Look below for instructions on how to check this. 

Multiple Levels, not just two

You can link contracts in such a way as to create a multiple level hierarchy, not just a two-step one. A contract may be a Master to a handful of Child contracts - but the same contract may also be a Child of a higher-level Master contract. 

Maybe you don't need to use them?

Depending on the number of contracts in your database, you may not need to link contracts together with Master and Child. It may be sufficient to do a quick search for a particular counterparty and then browse that party's contracts together in the search results.
However, if you have dozens of contracts for the same counterparty, and you wish to view which particular contracts are related to each other transactionally, it makes more sense to use Master and Child to link them together. 

Check whether Master and Child contracts are available for your contract

Depending on how your database has been configured, certain contract types may have had Master and Child relationships disabled. You will not be able to relate contracts of this type to others in your repository. Here's how to check:

  1. Open your contract and make sure you are in the Contract Maintenance Screen. Check out the screenshot below: if your screen doesn't say "Contract Maintenance Screen:" at the top, scroll down and click either the View or Edit buttons.

  2. Just under the "Contract Maintenance Screen" heading is a set of tabs. If you have a Related Contracts tab, then Master and/or Child relationships are available for this contract. If there is no Related Contracts tab, it's because Master and Child relationships have been disabled for this contract type.

If you still need to set up a Master and Child relationship, talk to your Power User about editing the Contract Type to add this functionality. 

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