Audience: Power Users
Continuing from our article on how to Create and Edit contract types, this article deals in more depth with the Roles, Dates, User-Defined Fields and Statuses tabs.
To view and edit these items' settings on a contract type:
go to the Contracts menu > Maintain Contract Types;
select a contract type to Edit, or click New to create a new one.
Tabs display available fields only
In the contract type maintenance screen, the Roles, Dates, User-Defined Fields and Statuses tab allow you to make statuses and certain fields available - or even mandatory - on your contract type.
However, these tabs will only display existing roles, dates, user-defined fields and statuses: they do not offer the option to create new ones.
If you wish to create a new custom field or status, or you don't see the one you want in these tabs:
1. Click the Save button to save your changes on your contract type. Then head over to the Contracts menu, and select either:
Maintain Status Types;
Maintain Role Types;
Maintain User-Defined Fields; or
Maintain Date Types
to create your new status or field.
2. Once created, go back into Maintain Contract Types and Edit your contract type.
3. Go to the appropriate tab (eg Roles) and you will see the newly-created role in the list of roles you can make available on this contract type.
For more details on how to create new fields or statuses, check out these articles:
Availability settings eg "Required, "Optional Unselected" etc
The Status tab allows you to set each status as either Available or Unavailable. Meanwhile the Roles, Dates and User-Defined Fields tabs offer at least four different availability settings:
Required - your Read-Write users will not be able to save a contract of this contract type without supplying a value for this field.
If you edit a contract type to make a field Required, and a Read-Write user subsequently edits an existing contract of this contract type, they won't be able to save the changes to that contract without supplying a value for this field.Optional Selected - while not mandatory, the field is visible in the contract entry wizard and the contract edit screen.
Optional Unselected - the field is not immediately visible unless the user clicks the Show/Hide Fields button. This will display all available fields and allow users to change their visibility between Selected and Unselected. Optional Unselected is useful for a field which you may need to use occasionally, but you don't want it cluttering the screen for all the other contracts.
Unavailable - if you have created any new roles, dates or user-defined fields, they will be Unavailable on all contract types until you edit this setting per contract type.
Dates tab only:
Required with Reminder - not only must your Read-Write users supply a date for this date type, they will need to check the "Email reminder" checkbox and supply a Reminder Type.
Reordering items
Reordering items in the Roles, Dates, Statuses and User-Defined Fields tab determines the order in which they appear on contracts of this contract type. There is additional significance to the order of Roles regarding escalating reminders and the Status which sits at the top of the order (see below).
To reorder items, you can use the Move Up button, or click the blue Order Number field to select a position as seen here:
Note: there is no requirement to move Unavailable fields down the order. If they are Unavailable, they will not appear on contracts of that type regardless of their order.
Roles tab
This tab shows the list of all role types, both internal and counterparty. In here you can define how roles are to be used in your contract type, and the order in which they appear on screen in the contract type. The order in which they appear on the screen is also the escalation order for sending out reminders.
Set each role to be either Required, Optional Selected, Optional Unselected or Unavailable.
Reorder the roles as required. If an escalating reminder is used on a contract date, the order of available internal roles will be the order of escalation.
Dates tab
This tab shows the list of all date types you may select for this contract type. You may reorder any dates except Start Date - if used, it always sits the top of the order.
If you set a date to be Required with Reminder, not only must your Read-Write users supply a date for this date type, they will need to check the "Email reminder" checkbox and supply a Reminder Type.
User-Defined Fields tab
This tab shows the list of all user-defined fields you may select for this contract type.
Statuses tab
This tab shows the list of all user-defined fields you may select for this contract type:
the first status in the order will be the default status of new contracts entered via the contract entry wizard.
if you are using an approval rule for contracts of this contract type, you do not need to set the Status After Approval or Status After Rejection to be Available in this list: they will be set automatically via the approval rule. Only set the status to be Available if you would like Read-Write users to be able to manually select the Status from the drop-down list when editing contracts of this type.
For details on how to complete the Summary, Counterparty, Documents, Business Units and Master tabs, refer back to our main article on how to Create and Edit Contract Types.