10.0.5 Contracts management

The contracts management group shows all contract-related reports in one place. This allows you to easily manage all your contracts.

The following columns have been renamed:

  • Current Contract Value has been renamed to Metric Quantity.
  • Current Measured Value has been renamed to Metric Measurement.

Purchase Orders has been renamed to called Purchases.

Advantages over old contracts

In previous BigFix Inventory versions, contracts supported only Seats and ELA metrics. Views of contract data is available only for software instances and not for current products and metrics. To improve product function, with contract management in BigFix Inventory version 10.0.5, you can define contracts according to all metrics. This ability helps you track contracts.
Note: IBM Flexpoint bundles are not available for contracts as license usage is covered by IBM License Service Reporter.
The purposes of improved contracts management are as follows:
  • Managing contracts from one report
  • Using contract metric calculation for products presented by computer groups
  • Managing contracts that are not limited to predefined metrics
  • Using the current measured metric value or software instances to drill down and view contract details

Deprecation

Starting from version 10.0.9, the old contracts and other deprecated features are removed, and migration is not possible. The customer must upgrade the deprecated contracts before the upgrade. The custom saved reports that relate to the deprecated report will not work as well. The customer must redefine the deprecated reports before the upgrade. See also, Migrating contracts.

Actions

With the contracts management feature, you can perform the following actions:
  • Search for specific contract to complete outstanding actions
  • Use predefined reports from dashboard to access saved reports.
  • Define custom reports or email notification to access the contract status
The reports are categorized into the following types:

Refer to the respective report type to know more about the actions you can perform on individual report type.

Contract fields and values

Field name Description
Contract Name Contract name. Two or more contracts can have the same name only if their types are different.
Contract ID Unique identifier of a contract.
Contract Type The type of the contract.
Computer Group Name Computer group that the contract belongs to.
Metric Metric value of the contract.
Software Product Any number of software products. If any metric is selected, it must be assigned to the selected software products.
Type Type of the contract.
Threshold Threshold for the contract measured value.
Contract Expense The sum of the expenses in all active contracts.
Cost Utilization Metric Measurement multiplied by Contract Unit Cost
Contract Unit Cost Estimated cost of a unit of a license metric for active purchases.
Purchases Any number of purchase orders assigned to the contract. Each purchase order consists of the following values:
  • Purchase Number - Identifier of the purchase order. All purchase orders in the contract must have different purchase numbers. Mandatory.
  • Document Link - Link to a document related to the purchase order. Optional.
  • Vendor - Optional.
  • Value - Value of the purchase order. Can be set to non-negative number or ELA. To change the value type use the “Convert to ELA” / “Convert to number” button. Mandatory.
  • Entitlement Start - Entitlement start date of the purchase order. Mandatory.
  • Entitlement End - Entitlement end date of the purchase order. If not specified, the purchase order is considered to have no entitlement end date. Optional.
  • Expense - Optional
  • Cost Center - - Optional
  • Unit Cost - Optional
  • Project - Optional
Based on the provided purchase order values, Current Contract Value, Next Entitlement Change Date, Next Entitlement Value and Entitlement End Date values are calculated.
Note: The Current Contract Value, Current Measured Value and Next Entitlement Value are calculated based on UTC time zone.

Add, modify, and delete contracts in the All Contracts report

With All Contracts report, you can add, modify, and delete contracts.

Improvements in the Add/Edit Contracts:
  • New columns, Expense, Unit Cost, Cost Center, and Project are added in Purchases section of Add/Edit Contracts.
  • New fields, Contract Expense, Contract Unit Cost added in Contract Details section of Add/Edit Contract page.
  • All expense-related numbers are rounded to 2 decimal digits and after rounding taken for further calculations.
Add contracts
  1. Open the All Contracts reports.
  2. Click Edit and select Add Contract. A New Contract window appears.
  3. Enter the field values and click Save.

    Result: A new contract is created.

Modify contracts
  1. Open the All Contracts reports.
  2. Select a contract, click Edit, and select Modify Contract. An Edit Contract window appears.
  3. Update the field values.
  4. Click Save.

    Result: The contract is updated.

Delete contracts
  1. Go to All Contracts reports.
  2. Select a contract, and click on Edit and select Delete Contract. A confirmation dialog box appears.
  3. Click Delete Contract.

    Result: The report is updated.

Apply filters in the contracts
10.0.12 From BigFix Inventory version 10.0.12, you can filter the contracts by Publisher Name and/or Software Product Name. For example, you can use this functionality to filter out all Microsoft specific contracts.
Note: The Publisher Name and Software Product Name parameters are available only as an option in the report filter, it's not available as report column.
Restriction: The add and edit contract window has the following constraints:
  • The date format is always in MM/DD/YYYY format.
  • The Select Year and Select Month labels in the date selector widget are not translated. They are always in English.
  • Software products with names containing non-ASCII characters cannot be assigned to a contract (applicable to BigFix Inventory versions before 10.0.7).
Import contracts
Import contracts using the UI and the API. For more information, see also Importing contracts.
10.0.11 From version 10.0.11, the All Contracts panel includes more options, such as Recalculation of metrics and a link to access the Product Metrics per Contract report. For more information, refer to Using the Product Metrics per Contract panel and Recalculating contracts.

Saved reports

The following contracts reports are included in the Saved reports list:

  • Contracts: All
  • Contracts: License Utilization Exceeded
  • Contracts: License Ended
  • Contracts: License Ends in 30 Days
  • Contracts: License Ends in 90 Days
  • Contracts: Threshold Exceeded
  • Contracts: Support Ended
  • Contracts: Support Ends in 30 Days
  • Contracts: Support Ends in 90 Days
Note: The report criteria was updated with Contracts: License Ends in 30 Days, Contracts: License Ends in 90 Days, Contracts: Support Ends in 30 Days, and Contracts: Support Ends in 90 Days reports to exclude expired contracts.

You can access saved reports from the predefined reports dashboard. For more information, see saved reports.