How contracts work

A contract in EyeOnTask is a service agreement with one client, running for a fixed term — the same thing you would sign in real life for an AMC on a piece of equipment, or a daily office cleaning arrangement.

What makes it more than a folder of jobs is that it bundles four things that would otherwise be managed separately: the schedule of work, the jobs that schedule produces, the prices those jobs bill at, and the invoices the client receives.

This page is the starting point: what a contract is, what it holds, and how to find and manage one. The pages listed under where to go next cover each part in detail.

The contract types

Which type you pick decides where the recurring money comes from, and the wizard changes to match.

Add Contract → Contract Details

• Fixed Price / Service Based — you are servicing the client. The recurring fee covers the scheduled work, and anything beyond what’s included is added on top. This is the AMC, the cleaning agreement, the camera maintenance contract.
• Equipment Leasing — you are renting your own assets to the client. The recurring money is the rent on those assets.
• Time Based — billing for actual effort or attendance, with overtime tracking. This one is coming soon: it is listed so you can see it, but cannot be chosen yet.

Both of the usable types share the same foundations — the term, the invoicing rhythm, rate cards, work patterns. What differs is where the recurring money comes from, so each has its own page: fixed price and service based and equipment leasing.

Alongside the type, the same first step carries the name and category, a description, the term, and any tags:

Add Contract → Contract Details

Start Date is the field that brings a contract to life — until it is set, there is no end date to work out and no schedule to lay down. Turn on No end date for an open-ended agreement; otherwise the duration is calculated for you and shown beneath the dates.

Note

The difference is whose equipment is involved. A servicing contract works on the client’s equipment; a leasing contract works on your own. One contract never mixes the two — though a leasing contract can still schedule work on the assets it rents out, which is covered on the equipment leasing page.

What a contract holds together

A contract sits in the middle of a chain. An approved quotation can become the contract; the contract’s work pattern generates jobs; those jobs feed the invoices.

Contract page → Overview tab

That strip is the timeline, and it is not specific to contracts — the same trail appears on a request, a quote and a job as well. Wherever you open it, it answers the same question: what happened, in order, and what was created from what.

Inside a contract you define:

• The term — the start and end dates it runs between.
• The client and site the work is for.
• Billing terms — how often you invoice, and how much.
• Rate cards — which services and inventory items this contract can charge for, at what rate, and how much of each is included free.
• Equipment — the assets the contract covers: the client’s, if you are servicing them, or your own, if you are leasing them out.
• Work patterns — the repeating schedule that creates the jobs.

The term

Contract page → Overview tab

Contracts typically run for six months or a year. When one reaches its end date you renew it into a fresh term rather than rebuilding it from scratch.

Scope of work and terms

Alongside the commercial terms, a contract carries the written detail — what you have agreed to do, and on what conditions.

Add Contract → Contract Specification

• Scope of Work — what the agreement actually covers. Rather than retyping it for every contract, Get Data From lets you pick an existing source and Fetch its text straight into the box.
• Terms & Condition — the conditions attached to the agreement.
• Add Extra fields / Notes — anything else this particular client needs recorded.
• Don’t send reminder for this contract — stops the reminders this contract would otherwise generate, for agreements you would rather keep an eye on yourself.

This is the text that flows into the client-facing document below.

The signed agreement

Everything you define here can be rendered into a service-agreement document that you preview, print, or email to the client — including for e-signature, with the signed copy coming back onto the contract.

That is covered in full in the contract document and e-signature.

Finding your contracts

Contracts on the main menu is the way in:

Main menu

The list opens with two tabs: Contract for live agreements, and Pre Drafted Contract for the reusable blueprints described in predrafted contracts and packages.

Simple View and Table View switch how the list is drawn. The table adds columns for amount, remaining amount, dates, status, invoice type, contract type and work pattern, and lets you search and filter across them:

Contracts → Table View

The button that creates a new contract sits in the same place in both views.

Reading a contract

Opening a contract always gives you the same page: the timeline across the top, the agreement’s details down the left, and billing on the right.

Contract page, full view

The tabs separate the contract itself from the work and money under it:

Contract page → tabs

The action buttons across the top are how you add to, reuse, or send the contract:

Contract page → action bar

Add Under This Contract creates work that belongs to this agreement:

Contract page → Add Under This Contract

And the ≡ menu handles reuse at the end of a term:

Contract page → ≡ menu

Further down, the supporting detail is collapsed into sections you can open as needed — scope of work, custom fields, terms, and the photos your fieldworkers captured on the job.

Contract page → Overview tab, lower sections

Note that Field Photos from Jobs are the pictures taken out in the field, which is a different thing from the Contract Document tab — that holds the agreement file itself.

Lifecycle

A contract moves from Draft to Running and finally to Expired. At that point you can Renew it into a new term, or Copy it to start a similar agreement for someone else.

A renewal is a fresh contract, not a continuation. It carries the same terms across — the fee, the rate card, the work patterns — but nothing else comes with it. Free quotas start again from zero, and used quota, balances and history stay with the term that ended. So a contract that included four service visits a year gives another four on renewal, not whatever was left over.

While it is running, Edit Contract reopens the same wizard with everything filled in, so you can change the terms, rates, equipment or work patterns without starting over. The delete icon beside it removes the contract, and asks you to confirm before it does.

Where to go next

Page	What it covers
Fixed price and service based contracts	The recurring fee, the rate card that decides what can be charged, free quotas and overage, with worked examples
Equipment leasing contracts	Renting out your own assets — per-asset or custom rent, flat versus usage-based rates
Work patterns	The repeating schedule that creates a contract’s jobs
Equipment on a contract	Servicing a client’s equipment versus leasing out your own
Jobs under a contract	How work reaches a contract, and what makes a job billable
Invoicing a contract	Automatic and manual invoicing, and Fetch & Link
Predrafted contracts and packages	Reusable blueprints, and selling them as packages on a quote
The contract document and e-signature	Generating the service agreement, sending it, and getting it signed
Questions and troubleshooting	Why a job didn’t bill, what resets on renewal, and other common sticking points

Settings behind this module

• Contract settings — Numbering, automatic PDF delivery and contract categories