Audience: standard users and power users
In your Contract Eagle database, you can link particular contracts together by setting up a Master and Child relationship. This allows you to search or browse for one contract and see all its related contracts together. However, a pre-requisite for this is that the contracts have the same counterparty.
Sometimes we have customers ask how they can link contracts that don't have the same counterparty, in a situation where their organisation views these contracts as "related" in some way. Below are two examples we've suggested to these customers, to help them use Search to come up with the goods. If these don't quite fit what you're trying to do, don't hesitate to get in touch with us.
The two examples in this article show you how to make use of searching on:
structured data in user-defined fields or custom dates; and
unstructured data in the summary or attached files.
Structured Data: link contracts using User-Defined Fields or Custom Dates
User-Defined Fields
A user-defined field is a way for you to categorise your contracts in the database other than by the standard fields of counterparty, contract type, start date, etc. Your power user can set up anything in here except a date (see below). Examples could be:
Contract value ($)
Sales Region (north, south, east, west)
Property address
A user-defined field could be set up as a free-text field, drop-down list or radio button. Once the field has been set up by a power user, anyone entering a contract into the database can use it to categorise contracts.
User-Defined Dates = Custom Dates
For user-defined dates, your power user can set these up under contract dates, together with the usual default dates of Contract Start Date, etc. Examples could be:
Premises Report due date
Insurance Certificate Expiry date
Once set up, anyone entering a contract can use these dates to categorise contracts.
How to set up custom dates
Using Search with User-Defined Fields or Custom Dates
The real benefit to working with User Defined Fields and Custom Dates comes when you are searching. Let's say you wanted to find all the Northern region contracts? Contracts with a value of $25,000 or more? Contracts with a Premises Report due date? Or all of the above?
With user-defined fields set up, you can search by these criteria and pull all the relevant contracts together in your search results. You can then print a report on this list of contracts.
Go to the Contracts menu > Searching / Reporting
Click the Advanced Contract Search tab.
In the Keyword/Value section (see screenshots below), click in the field labelled "Any field or document".
Scroll down and select the relevant user-defined field for your searching. Tip: all dates are prefixed "Event Date:" and user-defined fields are prefixed "Field:". Under these headings they are then listed in alphabetical order.
Click in the field labelled "Contains" and change the operator if necessary, eg "equals", "is less or equals", or "is defined" to search for contracts where this field contains data.
In "Keyword", enter the text, date or numerical value to search for.
Next, either click Search or, if you wish to add more criteria, click Add another row and repeat the steps above.
To print a report, just click the Report button before or after you click Search.
Below are examples of "all contracts in the north sales region", "all contracts with a value of 25,000 or more", and both together: "all northern contracts worth 25,000 or more".
All contracts in the north sales region:
All contracts worth 25,000 or more:
All contracts in the north sales region worth 25,000 or more:
Unstructured Data: link contracts through summary or attached files
A customer once asked us about structuring their database: they have a large portfolio of property maintenance contracts. Each contract might cover several different properties; and each contract is generally with a different counterparty, so they couldn't use Master/Child. They wanted to be able to search on a particular address and see all the maintenance contracts that related to it.
User-defined fields wouldn't be appropriate here, as you can only have free text, or one option per drop-down. For example, if "Sales Region" were a drop-down you could only have "north" or "west", not both. Further, the maintenance contracts sometimes covered upwards of 30 properties!
The simple solution was to remember that any data entered on a contract in Contract Eagle is text searchable - and this includes any files attached to that contract.
For their property contracts the customer decided to include a list of addresses:
in the contract summary field; or,
as an attached Word document or text-searchable PDF.
Then, to find all the contracts that relate to a certain address, all the customer needs to do is enter the property address - or even just the street name - in the search box. This will pull together all the contracts which have that address entered somewhere in their data or attached, text-searchable files.
Sometimes the simple solutions are the best!