Customer Contracts

Contracts with customers

Module: Contracts · also Domains · Raised in #153

Until now every contract in FreeITSM was one you buy — a supplier, a renewal date, a notice period. If you also sell — a support agreement you provide, a managed service, a hosting plan — those contracts had nowhere to go. Now a contract can be with either side.

📌 Nothing that exists changes. Every contract you already have is a supplier contract, exactly as before. Customer contracts are a new choice, not a new meaning for an old field.

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Adding a customer contract

1. Contracts → + New contract (or edit an existing one).
2. Under Contract with, choose Customer.
3. Pick the company, a person, or both:
   • Company — one of your companies. The list only offers companies you can see. (On a single-company install there is no company to pick — just choose the person.)
   • Person — start typing a name or email; anyone in Users can be chosen. Pick a company first and the search only offers people in that company.
4. Fill in the rest as usual — dates, value, notice period, terms, documents. They all work the same way.

A contract is with a supplier or a customer, never both — switching to Customer clears the supplier, and back again.

Finding them

• The contracts list has a With column showing the supplier or the customer, and customer contracts carry a small Customer badge.
• The drop-down above the list shows Suppliers and customers, Suppliers only or Customers only.
• Search finds a contract by its customer's company or person name as well as by supplier.

Everything else — the contract page, tasks and calendar events raised from it, equipment linked to it, the equipment report, Watchtower's expiry counts, the contract.expiring workflow trigger — works the same for both kinds.

Who can see a customer contract

A supplier contract is shared across the whole install, as it always was. A customer contract belongs to its customer's company — so by default:

An analyst who cannot see the customer's company cannot see the contract.

Not in the list, the contract page, a preview, ⌘K search, the Recent trail, Watchtower counts, documents attached to it, or the REST API. To them it simply is not there.

If the contract names only a person, the person's company counts. A person with no company belongs to the Default company, as everywhere else in FreeITSM.

Changing it

Contracts → Settings → Customer contracts has two choices:

Choice	What it means
Analysts who can see the customer's company (default)	As described above. Recommended for an MSP, where one customer's agreement is not another account manager's business.
Everyone with access to Contracts	Customer contracts are shown to everybody who can open Contracts, the same as supplier contracts.

The tab is a sensitive setting: only an admin, or a role given Contracts → Customer contracts, can change it.

Domains: the customer a domain is for

A domain already belongs to a company. It can now also name the person it is looked after for — open the domain, Edit, and use the Customer field. The search only offers people in the domain's own company, because the domain's company is the customer's company.

The domain's owner (an analyst) is unchanged and still receives the renewal reminders. Leave Customer empty and nothing is different.

Since 3.1.0 (#162) a domain's customer can instead be a supplier, optionally with one of its contacts, for customers you keep in Contracts → Suppliers rather than in Users; and its technical contact can be one of your analysts as well as a supplier contact. See Domains.

Everything about a customer, in one place

A contract's customer and a domain's customer link to their People page — one page per person and per company, showing their tickets, equipment, contracts, domains, courses and form submissions together.

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See also: Contracts · Domains · Multi-tenancy · Customer contracts — Developer Guide