Audience: Power Users

Contract Eagle comes with a Standard contract type out of the box. Before long, you'll want to set up your own contract types to use as a basis for entering your organization's different contracts, for example:

Contract types are also easy to modify. You can set them up and, if you find after using them for a while that you need to do things a little differently, just edit them.

Go to the Contracts menu > Maintain Contract Types. In here you'll see the list of existing contract types.

This launches the Contract Type Maintenance screen which consists of ten tabs to help you create or edit your contract type.

Allows you to name your contract type, set up default text for contract titles, add help text

Description

The name of the new contract type, eg "Statement of Work", "Lease", "Employment Agreement" etc.

Allow New Contracts
If checked, allows Read-Write users to create new contracts using this contract type. Effectively you can "archive" this contract type by unchecking this box; this would prevent new contracts based on this contract type from being created but existing ones are still searchable.
​
​Allow Search
If checked, displays this contract type in the Advanced Search tab > Contract Type drop-down. If this box is unchecked, this contract type is not displayed in that list, but contracts of this contract type are still searchable eg by contract ID, name, counterparty, etc. 

Business Unit
This field simply allows contract types to be organized under a particular Business Unit. Only Power Users within that Business Unit will be able to make changes to this contract type. Unless you have a large organization with many devolved Power Users, you can just save your new contract type under the Default Business Unit.

​You can specify the Business Units which can create new contracts based on this contract type under the Business Units tab. See details below.

Contract Title Default | Contract Summary Default
Any text in these fields will display as default or placeholder for Read-Write users entering a new contract of this contract type. You can use this to help users comply with naming conventions for contracts, or to speed up the entry of an accurate contract summary.  

This screenshot shows how the text would appear to a Read-Write user entering a new contract in the Contract Entry Wizard. The Default text is in the blue fields:

Contract Title Help | Contract Summary Help

Any text in these fields will display as italicized help text to Read-Write users entering a new contract of this contract type. See the screenshot above where the text sits in italics just underneath the blue fields.

Allows you to specify whether your contract type will have counterparties and, if so, whether multiple counterparties are allowed.

Counterparty Option

Select one of the three options:

If you select "No counterparties", the Counterparty step will not appear in the contract entry wizard; nor will the counterparty contacts step.

Counterparty Help

If you select either option 2 or 3 above, you can edit the help text that appears to Read-Write users when they get to the counterparty step in the new contract entry wizard.

These tabs allow you to make statuses and certain fields available - or even mandatory - on your contract type, and set the order in which they appear on contracts.

For more details on these tabs, refer to our separate article on Contract Types: Roles, Dates, User-Defined Fields and Statuses Tabs.

Note: these four tabs will only display existing roles, dates, user-defined fields and statuses. They do not offer the option to create new ones. To create a new item, Save your changes to the contract type and go to one of the other Maintain menu options, eg "Maintain User-Defined Fields", "Maintain Roles" etc.

The documents tab allows you to configure the options around documents or other files uploaded to contract records: whether uploading documents and other files is mandatory or optional, sort order of documents, document request tasks, and the status of a contract when using document request tasks or signing.

Show the documents step

If this option is unchecked, users will not see the option to upload documents or other files in the Contract Entry Wizard. They can still upload files within a contract itself, from the Documents tab > New button.

Either a document or task must be attached

This makes it mandatory for new contract to either have a file or document uploaded, or for the Read-Write user to send a document request task to another Contract Eagle user.

Document Sorting

Choose Newest first, Oldest first, or in alphabetical order by document Description.

Document Help

The help text displayed when Read-Write users enter a new contract via the Contract Entry Wizard. Text is displayed here:

You can specify different Status options for when a contract's documents have been sent for signing, and after they are all signed. These statuses can be set globally by a System Administrator under Admin > System Preferences. However, if you want this particular contract type to have different signing statuses from the global settings, you can make a selection in here. Leave it blank - or clear the selection - to revert to the global status settings:

Document Request Tasks are designed to make it easier to bring together all a contract's related documents and attachments. A Read-Write user who is entering a contract, but who does not have the relevant contract documents, can send a Task to another user requesting such files. The second user goes to complete the Task and is prompted to attach a file. On closing the Task, the attached file is associated with the contract record in Contract Eagle.

This section allows you to control settings around Document Request Tasks for this contract type:

Show the Document Request Task option

If this is unchecked, a Read-Write user can still send a Document Request Task from the Tasks tab of a contract.

Default Task Title, Description and Days Until Task is Due

If your Read-Write users will be sending these Tasks to request largely the same types of file, you can save time by pre-populating the task Title, Description and Due Date. See the examples above.

Prevent task being closed

If this is checked, a person receiving a document request task cannot complete it without attaching a file. If they are really stuck, however, they can reassign the task to someone else or back to the user who originally requested it, with a comment.

Document Task Help

This text will display in the Documents step of the contract entry wizard, to help Read-Write users understand when they can or should use a Document Request Task. You can edit the default text to put any business process guidance in here.

Contract Status After Upload

This is a useful technique to invoke an approval rule to notify a user when a document has been uploaded via a Document Request Task. This can prompt them to check what has been uploaded. See our separate article on creating an approval workflow around responses to document request tasks.

In this tab you can specify the Business Units in which contracts of this contract type can be saved.

If you have created any new Business Units they will be Not Used on all contract types until you edit this setting per contract type. See our separate article on how to Create and Edit Business Units which also covers how to add them to your contract types.

In this tab you can allow or restrict contracts based on this contract type to be available as a master contract, available as a child contract, or to require them to have a master contract.

Make your selections under Availability as a master contract and Availability as a child contract.

As with the comments tab on other entities, this allows you to capture the circumstances or reasons for making edits. Eg for edits to a contract type you can capture a comment such as "Removed requirement to have a master contract following feedback from Procurement team", etc.
​