17. Creating Contracts
So if you have pretty basic contract management needs in your organization, you can use the out of the box functionality for contracts inside of Salesforce. I have worked in instances where that is the case and I’ve also worked in instances where the contract lifecycle was so complex with a lot of legalese and redlining of documents, a lot of back and forth in a very convoluted sales process that we had to leverage third party applications off the app Exchange.
One they have experience with is called SpringCM, based out of Chicago. Pretty nice tool that I’m pretty familiar with and so you don’t need to worry about third party contract management tools so much. But I wanted to let you know that this is much like many things with Salesforce is they will provide you out of the box functionality but it may not quite meet your needs at some point. So if you can’t customize it fully to meet your use case then that would be a scenario where you might want to leverage the app exchange. But let’s create a contract here with the out of the box functionality.
Now by clicking new from the related list on the account record. We previously changed the page layout to include these related lists. So now we’re going to take advantage of that by clicking new from the contracts related list on the account for Dickinson Plc. Now on the contract we’ve already automatically filled in the account because we’re creating the new account from that. We’re creating the new contract from Dickinson Plc account and the status of the contract is in draft status and you can have other status designations. This is all customizable to begin with.
We’ve got draft activated or in approval process and then you’ve got a contract start date. Let’s say we’re going to put this at the end of this month for a contract term of 36 months. And so we can also specify who signed the contract and title and the date that they signed the contract and then as well, owner expiration notice is something that’s kind of interesting. This is a quasi new feature of Salesforce and something that I had to build and customize early on in my career was that one of my earlier contracts that I worked as a salesforce developer had to do with letting the account owner know when a contract is getting ready to expire. So as we approach the end of a contract, we want to be alerted to that so that we’re not surprised and they don’t renew.
We want to have a long runway here so let’s set that to a 90 day expiration notice for the account owner and you can fill in other information here and tie this to a price book as well. Fill in the address information or customize that this is pulled in from the account and then you can have special terms, description and as well all of this is customizable but let’s just click Save. And so I believe contracts are auto numbered. So this is contract number 100 and that is tied to Dickinson Plc. And so now that we have a contract, we can then create an order and tie it to that contract. If we click new on orders from the orders related list on the account we see for contract number, it’s pulling up as an option for me to select this contract number 100. And then as well, since I’m creating a new order from the Dickinson Plc account, it’s filled in that information as well, then we can just fill in the rest of the required fields here and click Save. And then, as we did before, we would need to then go in and add products to this order.
And so we’re going to, of course, order more lawn dart sets and we’re just going to do I’ve not enabled a quantity of zero, so let’s see if that blocks us. And it does, and I’ve not enabled a negative quantity either. So this should also warn us. And so let’s say, okay, quit fooling around. We’re not doing any reduction orders, let’s just do nine sets of lawn darts, click Save. And so now we have got an order and this one differs from the other one because it is tied to not only an account but also to a contract. Whereas our other order, if I go back in to that one, it is tied to an account but not a contract.
So you can do these and decouple these by, as I mentioned previously, making the contract number not required on the order page layout. And so now that we’ve created a contract, you can pull those up as well from the all items and create new orders from here as well. And the difference here is that you would need to manually go in and specify the account. Some of these other items though on contracts, it’s just start date. Some of this can be adjusted in the contract settings. And in the next lesson, we’ll look at how you can adjust and change some of your contract settings inside of your salesforce instance.
18. Contract Settings
The contract settings for your Salesforce instance by searching for Contract settings and clicking on it and Set Up. Now, there’s only three simple checkboxes here, but there’s a plethora of craziness that lurks beneath those three check boxes. And I want to point you to a Help article that has a lot of goodness in it. And when I read it, I was like, Goodness, there’s a lot here. And that Helps article is called Set Up Contracts, which I just kind of refreshed to pull it up again. And I’ll link to this in this lesson. But you can pull that up by just going into Contract Settings and clicking Help for this page. And so there’s more details in depth around what it means for the auto calculation of contract end dates.
For example, so if you leave the contract start date or contract term blank and the contract end date is blank. And so if you remember in this contract that we created, we entered a start date of the end of the month and then a term of 36 months. So it auto calculated the end date for the contract because we have that enabled already under contract settings, at least in my instance, it was already set to auto calculate contract end dates. Now, there’s a couple of other checkboxes here. One is to send a contract expiration notice emails to account and contract owners.
Now, there’s more details on that as well under the Set Up Contracts Help article. And that has to do with enabling contract expiration notices. And that one is more straightforward. There’s not a lot of depth to that one. Basically, whoever the owner of the account and the contract are will get email notifications based on that notification period that we set on the contract. But what I want to look at is having to do with track history for all statuses or for all statistics. If you’re a more astute vocabulary. I don’t even know if that’s a word, but it sounds good. If it’s not a word, I just created a word. So I want to go on record vocabulary sounds like a character in Star Trek, but I digress.
All right, so Track history for all stati is here. And so out of the box, the default is to track history for contracts with the status of in approval process or activated. But you can change that to Track history for all Statuses by selecting that checkbox, track History for All Statuses. So that is really the end of the details on those three checkboxes. But there’s some other goodness here and that has to do with showing a contract on Opportunity or quote details. And that is getting into going into the Object Manager, setting the field level security, viewing the field accessibility, setting things as hidden, and then selecting vatable under page layout.
We’re not going to do all that, but I want to make you aware of that, that you can show a contract on the opportunity or quote details. And then as well, you can even enable a Contracts Chatter feed by going into feed Tracking and selecting Contract and enabling it. And that way you can also enable Chatter Feed Tracking on Contracts as well. So check out this help article, but I wanted to make you aware of that in addition to the contract settings. And so we’ll go ahead and leave these checked and click Save in order to complete the set up of our contract settings. But we’re not done with Contracts yet. There’s another piece of the puzzle with Contracts and that has to do with contact roles on Contracts and we will pontificate about that in the next lesson.
19. Contact Roles on Contracts
In addition to contract settings, we also have this option here for contact roles on Contracts. So let’s click on that. I’ll show you what this is all about. Now, you may have seen something similar before in Salesforce, such as for opportunity teams or account teams. This is something very similar as far as the different roles that different contacts can play on a contract. And so these are the apps out of the box contract contact role pick list values. Now, in order to see this in action, what we need to do though is we need to change the page layout on the Contract page layout. So I’ve tapped over to my contract and if I select the gear icon and select Edit Page, this defaults in the Lighting app builder to the Related tab. Now, you notice I can’t get to the page layout link from here, but if I click on Details, this little hack here, you want to be sure you go from the Details to then click somewhere in the Details and this updates this and you’re looking for preview so that you know you’ve got the right page layout. Now we’ve only got one for Contract, but still, that’s the quickest way that I know of to get to this page layout. I missed the old Force. com fly out menu in Salesforce Classic because I could edit the page layout directly from that in Classic. But that’s kind of a similar hack in Lightning for you.
I know I’ve talked about that before, but I wanted to really specify that you got to go from the Details tab in order to pull that up. Now, Related Lists and it’s here that we have our Contact Roles Related list that we’re going to add to our contract. It’s a little bit of a mouthful because we’re doing a Contact Role Related list. So it’s a contract contact role. Click Save, click yes. And so now if we go back into our contract and click back and not save it and confirm that we want to leave the Lightning app builder because we did not change the Lightning page, we changed the underlying page layout in the enhanced page layout editor. So now we’ve got our contact roles related list. So now if we add a contact role, this is where we can add one or multiple contacts. And by multiple we could enter one here and then click Save a new to enter another and another.
We can search for contacts here. And it would be really nice if Salesforce would just pop up any contacts for this account. Let me try to get this right or be close to real life here. So let me click on the account and see if I can pull up any contacts. And there’s Andy Young as a contact.
So let me go back and try and remember Andy Young to add a contact role. So let’s search for Andy. I’ve got his name written on the bottom of my boot. It’s a little Toy Story joke for you there. So here is the infamous contract contact role. You see business user, et cetera, all the way down to the infamous other. And so if we go back to whatever tab I had this in here’s our contract contact roles. I feel like I’m saying that wrong every time I say it. And you see, these are the business user down to other. We can reorder these, we can replace, we can add additional by creating new ones and this would be the role that this person plays on the contract. So it might be like accountant or legal and I just put health and safety inspector just to be odd. And so now that is active. We can deactivate contract contact roles as well. Let me deactivate influencer because why not? So yes, I’m sure, let me click okay, it doesn’t seem to be doing anything. Let me refresh it may be lightning being lightning, so refreshing. It does pull the influencer down into the inactive values.
Let me do another one evaluator. Let me deactivate that and say yes, I’m sure and it’s refreshing this time. It wasn’t refreshing before, I don’t think so anywho. So when you deactivate it just shows an active value. So let’s go back to our contract, let’s cancel out of this and let’s try this again and let’s pull up our roles here. And we have health and safety inspector has been an additional contract contact role and then we also removed a couple as well. Let’s put Andy back in his rifle role on this contract and we’ll make him the primary contact on this contract and click save. And so that is another setting for contracts, has to do with the contact roles.
And so as you can see, there’s a lot of other objects that we’ve dealt with as it relates to the sales applications knowledge area of the exam. And for the admin exam you got really familiar with accounts and opportunities and leads. But we’ve been getting into other things now such as contracts, orders, quotes and so there’s still yet more related to cells that you’ve not broached if you’ve only worked your way through the admin certification or you’ve barely brushed up against it and that would be forecast. And so now we are still continuing on in this knowledge area of sales cloud applications, but we’re going to pivot now away from contracts and orders and quotes and deal more specifically with forecast and we will start down that path in the next slide.
