General description #

A sales contract is an agreement between you and the buyer. The sales contract details what is being sold, the amount, the price, the pricing factor, and various conditions. The sales contract also gives various details related to the broker agreement. By scheduling the contract quantity over the upcoming months or weeks, the sales contract also allows you to plan the contract quantity periodically as per your requirements.

Create a sales contract #

You can create a new sales contract by following the given steps and adding the information in various sections of the sales contract, as explained in detail.

1. Click or press “Add.”
2. Enter the necessary information. Make sure to fill in all the required fields, which are marked in red in each section.
3. Click or press “Save,” and the new sales contract is created.

Sections #

Generic Information #

This section includes general information about a sales contract. You can add the subsidiary, the payment condition, the delivery conditions, the location/delivery address and various other details in the generic section of the sales contract.

Product Information #

In this section of the sales contract, you can select the product to be sold and mention the product description. You can select the packaging, which will auto-fill the quantity per packing and packing count values from the root data.

Brokerage #

In this section of the sales contract, you choose the broker, and only those relations will be displayed in the broker drop-down, which has been marked as the commission agent. You need to select a commission basis with two values: delivered quantity and contract quantity.

Pricing and quantity information #

In the quantity section, you can choose the quantity and its unit (e.g., kg or lb). You can enter the pricing factor, price, and quantity of the product. The pricing factor determines the price per unit; for example, if the pricing factor is 10 and the unit is kg, the price is per 10 kg. Some fields, like delivered, remaining, planned, invoiced, and contract quantity, are automatically calculated and filled in after the orders are created for the sales contract.

• Delivered Quantity = Quantity of finalized orders.
• Remaining quantity = (Total quantity – (Delivered quantity + Amortized Quantity) ). 
• Planned Quantity = Non-finalised ordered Quantity. 
• Contract Quantity = (Price * Total Quantity).

Dry Matter Handling #

For products with some dry matter, pricing may vary from dry to non-dry parts of the product. For such products, it is specified in the pricing factor column whether the price of the agreed products is based on the product’s dry matter or the product quantity. In either case, the price will fluctuate if the actual weight and/or dry matter part vary from the agreed amount. 

To illustrate, consider a sales contract where the agreed contract value is based on 1000 kg per product with a dry matter content of 50%. If the total weight of the products is 25,000 kg, then the agreed price is 25,000 EUR.

If we were to adjust the pricing factor to per 1000 kg of dry matter, the value of the sales contract is halved, because 50% of 25,000 kg is 12,500 kg. See the example below:

When pricing is based on dry matter in a sales contract, there are two options for charging extra: “charged over total” and “charged over non-dry matter.” 

“Charged over total” adds value based on the dry matter portion of the sales contract. Meanwhile, “charged over non-dry matter” adds value based on the non-dry matter portion of the sales contract. In the above example, adding 10% in the “charged over total” part will add 2,500 EUR to the total sales contract value and adding 10% in the “charged over non-dry matter” part will add 1,250 EUR to the total sales contract value.

Planning #

In this section, you can plan to order the quantities from the sales contract periodically, either monthly or weekly. You can also directly order the contracted quantity.

Contract planning information, whether weekly or monthly is also displayed in various reports like Purchase planning, position lists, etc.

Additional Information #

You can manually add planning months and dates to the schedule, including quantity details per month, or it can get the data from the planning section of the sales contract by clicking or pressing ‘Fill from planning’, ‘Incl. quantity’, ‘Short notation’. You can also add text lines, contract remarks, and internal remarks. Text lines added to root data will be displayed in the drop-down list of text line fields.

Actions on Sales contract screen #

After saving a sales contract you can perform various actions on a sales contract using the multiple buttons on the top section of the sales contract. The various buttons available in the action panel are:

• Navigation buttons: You can use these buttons to navigate to the first, previous, next, and very last sales contracts from the contract screen.
• Save: You can save any changes made to the sales contract using this button.
• Audit log: The summarised details about the log of the sales contract is displayed in a pop-up box using this. the pop-up usually shows the name and time details of the user who created the sales contract or made changes to the sales contract,
• New: You can create a new sales contract using this button.
• Contract layout: You can select the layout to be used for printing, previewing and emailing the document from this drop-down.
• Preview: You can preview the document using this button.
• Print: You can print the document using this button. The number counter on this button gives the number of times the sales contract has been printed
• Copy contract: You can create a new duplicate sales contract using this button. The copied sales contract includes all of the original sales contract’s product, pricing, quantity, and planning details. If any attachments are added to the original sales contract, a pop-up window appears asking if you want to copy the attachments, and you can copy the attachments.
  But it should also be noted that you can’t copy a sales contract when the relation has been sales restricted and the product used in the existing sales contract has not been added in the “Customer for” of the relation screen.
• Email: You can mail the sales contract using this button. you can either mail with the default settings/selections (default cc, signature) made for the relation used in the sales contract or operating subsidiary of the sales contract.
• Create proforma invoice: This button is used to directly create a proforma invoice for the sales contract.
• Create pre-paid sales invoice: This button is used to directly create a pre-paid sales invoice from the sales contract screen. You can enter a percentage of the total contract quantity to create the pre-paid sales invoice.
• Remove: Using this button, you can delete a sales contract. The sales contract can only be deleted if no order or broker agreement is associated with the sales contract.
• Search: This button directs you to the sales contract overview screen, where you can search for any other sales contract.
• Log: You can view the changes you made to the contract using this button. Changes made by other users are not displayed in this pop-up for normal users. However, for administrator users, it shows all changes made by other users, allowing them to track all modifications to the contract.

Detailed explanation of certain fields #

• Historical contract: Any previous sales contract quantity, if left, is added to the new sales contract by checking this field.
• Is Revised: If a sales contract is mailed once and changes are made to it. You can mark this field ‘is revised’ that indicates to the receiver that some changes have been made in the sales contract by the text ‘Revised’ on the layout.
• Is dummy contract: If marked, the sales contract is treated as a dummy sales contract.
• Internal contact persons: Added logistic employees to that particular user will appear in the drop-down.
• Origin for Intrastat: This field lets you enter the country of origin of the products used for Intrastat export. E.g. if your Dutch customer is selling German products in Belgium, you can enter Germany in this field on the order screen. Using that, you will be able to provide data to the government about their trade within the EU.

Contract Locking #

Contract locking is the practice of restricting any modifications to a sales contract when it is being concurrently accessed by two or more users. If two users are simultaneously working on the same sales contract, the sales contract becomes locked for the second user. Consequently, the second user is unable to make any alterations to the sales contract and is presented with a message on the Save button indicating that the ‘Contract is in use by user 1.’

During this locked state, the user is prohibited from making any changes to the sales contract and is also unable to perform the following actions on the sales contract:

1. Copy the sales contract.
2. Create a new order from the sales contract.
3. Delete the sales contract.
4. Create a prepaid sales invoice from the sales contract.
5. Create a proforma invoice from the sales contract.

However, the user can perform other actions like print, preview, or email the sales contract while it is still in the locked state. The primary objective of sales contract locking is to guarantee that only a single user is handling a sales contract at a time and that changes made by one user are not overridden by the changes made by the other user.

Changing the currency of the contract #

Qbil-trade allows you to change the currency of a sales contract, even after creating the currency contracts or invoices in the orders related to the sales contract. On changing the currency of the sales contract, the currency of the related expected goods invoice or booked purchase invoice is not affected but the currency of the associated currency contract (hedging contract) is changed. To monitor and avoid any potential risk due to the currency change, different pop-up messages are alerted on the sales contract screen at the time of the currency change, depending upon the state of the sales contract.

• If a sales contract has no associated invoice or hedging contract, a pop-up with the message “The currency of this contract will be changed” is shown on changing the currency of the contract.
• If a sales contract has an associated sales/pre-paid invoice a pop-up with the message “This contract already has one or more associated invoices Changing the currency of this contract will not reflect on the associated items” is shown.
• If the sales contract is made in foreign currency and a currency hedging contract is associated with it, then on currency changing of contract a pop-up with the message “This contract already has one or more associated hedge contracts. Changing the currency of this contract might affect the hedge lines.” is shown.
• If the sales contract made in foreign currency has associated currency hedging contracts as well as sales/pre-paid invoices, on changing the contract currency, a pop-up with the message “This contract already has one or more associated invoices and currency hedge contracts. Currency hedge contracts might also be affected. Changing the currency of this contract will not reflect on the associated items” is displayed.