What is the Contracts module?

The Contracts module keeps your commercial agreements in one connected record. Each contract holds its terms, renewal decisions, linked parties, covered assets and locations, files, comments, dated amendments, and a full audit trail, so everything about an agreement lives in one place instead of a spreadsheet or a shared drive. Every contract belongs to a site.

What a contract record holds

A contract record captures who the agreement is with, what it covers, and the money and dates behind it. Status, Owner, Category, and Type come first, followed by reference details: Contract Number, Reference, and Account Number. Dates and terms cover Start Date, Expiry Date (or no fixed expiry), Auto-Renews (Yes or No), Term, Notice Period, and Renewal Frequency. The financial fields are Money Direction, Amount, Currency, and Payment Frequency, and you can add Tags and Notes.

Money Direction records which way the money flows: "We Pay", "We Receive", or "No Value".

You classify each contract with a Type. The available types are:

• Service / Maintenance

• Supply / Purchase

• Consultancy / Contractor

• Licence / Subscription

• Insurance Policy

• Lease / Tenancy

• Hire / Letting

• Employment

• Partnership

• Grant / Funding

• Other

How contracts connect to everything else

Contracts are connected records, like everything else in CalmCompliance. From a contract you can move straight to the companies, people, assets, and locations it involves, without re-entering anything.

• Parties: link Companies and People to the contract. The party label depends on the contract type, for example Supplier, Provider, Insurer, or Landlord.

• Party contacts: link People to a party as its contacts, so you know who to speak to.

• Covers: link the Assets and Locations the contract applies to, so an asset's record leads back to its maintenance agreement or insurance policy.

• Files: attach documents to the contract, and give each file its own expiry date.

• Comments: discuss the contract in threaded comments on the Contract Details page.

• Amendments: change terms with dated amendments. Each amendment records what changed and keeps the previous values in history, so you can always see what the terms were before.

How the contract lifecycle works

A contract moves from creation through renewal decisions to renewal, replacement, or lapse, and the record follows it the whole way.

You create the contract with its terms, parties, and covered records. Each term can then carry a renewal decision: "Let It Renew", "Reviewing", "Give Notice", "Renew or Replace", or "Let It Lapse". When the contract has a notice period, the record tracks the notice deadline and lets you record that notice was given. When the agreement ends or changes, you can link a successor contract as a renewal, a replacement, or a sub-agreement, so the new contract points back to what it succeeded.

For how to work through a decision before the deadline, see the "How renewal decisions work" article in this section.

Where everything lives

The Contracts module has four surfaces, and each one answers a different question:

• The Contracts register: the list of all contracts on your site. Start here to find a contract or see what is expiring.

• The Contract Details page: everything about one contract: terms, parties, covered records, files, comments, amendments, and history.

• Contracts Insights: a dashboard over your whole contract portfolio. See the "Use Contracts Insights" article in this section.

• Contract Settings: where site-level admins configure contract categories (the Categories tab) and contract behaviour such as comment visibility (the Options tab).

To record your first agreement, see the "Create a contract" article in this section.

Sharing contracts across sites

On multi-site organizations, contracts can be shared with child sites, and a site can override sharing for an individual contract. Contracts your site inherits from a parent site are read-only: you can view and use them, but you cannot change them on your site.

Who can do what

Access to contracts is controlled by three module roles:

• Contracts Member: view contracts, take part in comments, and use Contracts Insights.

• Contracts Manager: everything a Member can do, plus see all comments, create and edit contracts, and manage categories.

• Contracts Admin: everything a Manager can do, plus delete contracts.

Changing the options on Contract Settings needs a site-level admin role.