Recording costs from multiple years of renewals

Portal User asked a question.

July 3, 2018 at 7:00 AM

I have several records

Purchase of several different applications with perpetual entitlement, and embedded in to the total cost of each application is the cost of the licenses and the 1st year of maintenance.
Year 2 cost to extend maintenance
Year 3 cost to extend maintenance
Year 4 cost to extend maintenance

I'd like to save labor time and reduce any inconsistencies in dates and costs and associate licenses to an agreement record, and with each renewal extend maintenance on the agreement record, which would cover the associated licenses.

I'd also like to have as much financial information as possible available for Snow's financial elements to use.

The quandary is how to record the costs of the 3 years of renewals without having to touch each and every license record, each year. I don't see any financial fields on the agreement; it's all on the license records.

And if I want to record the 3 years of maintenance costs on the Maintenance and Support tab of the license records, I have to disconnect the record from the date range of the agreement. Which now has me at the point where the agreement record is of no value other than for visually grouping the licenses.

I see two solutions

First

on the agreement record -
- record the renewal details of PO, Invoice # and total cost in the Description field
- add the new agreement period
on each license record -
- in the 1 available Maintenance cost field add the new year's renewal cost to whatever happens to be there from the prior years. In my example that would be 3 years' worth of costs in 1 field.
- if the renewal cost is 1 line for all the affected license records, I'll have to figure out how to break this 1 cost out across the affected records.

Second

Don't record maintenance costs at all; update the agreement record only

I either save time, keep risk low, and lose out on cost reporting or I have cost reporting, spend a lot of time editing license records individually, and introduce inconsistencies.

Am I missing something here?

SamuelBaughan
8 years ago
Hi Mary, From our experience, it appears that the " Maintenance Agreement " type actually seems to be a kind of " warranty " record rather than a " Software Maintenance " as it seems to indicate. So there are several options still: You can create your own Custom agreement type and add the fields you need You could simply use the maintenance period/cost fields on each license You can still use the " Maintenance Agreement " type but attach a document (maybe a spreadsheet) to this agreement that gives the detail of the maintenance costs. This wide choice actually shows how flexible Snow is. Internally, we record our software maintenance details into each separate license but we do also use spreadsheets attached to licenses (especially multi-seat/volume licenses) that indicate some specific information that cannot be easily recorded into Snow. If I had to transpose that to your situation, I would say that we would go for option #3. Regards
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Portal User
8 years ago
Personally, I tend to split out the costs as associated with a license and use the Maintenance field. To me is matter not if this is a warranty or not but more the fact that the software is covered and that there is a cost. Doing this, we have been able to pull reports showing Total Maintenance Costs for the period of the license and this has helped with the renewal by showing: Total cost Cost per year Increases per year With one vendor, we have proved a percentage increase of 38% from the previous period and added ammunition for the renewal team to use.
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- SamuelBaughan
  8 years ago
  Hi Mark, I think Mary's concern is to benefit from the propagation of the maintenance data down to all the licenses attached to the agreement in the same way a Software Agreement allows you to propagate down the subscription period to all the attached licenses. Unfortunately, the Maintenance Agreement type is apparently not what it appears to be. Regards
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  - Portal User
    8 years ago
    Hi ‌, When I first explored the Maintenance and the Support agreement types and saw that you could only associate computer records to them my mind went back to my days of managing hardware renewals where 'maintenance' was the service covering the hardware replacements and 'support' was the service for phone calls to the support hotline as well as any dispatching of troubleshooting and repair crews to our premises. You are correct that I'd hoped to be able to store my software maintenance renewal costs on the software agreement type records and have all those $s reflected in the financial reports. I can't see that that's possible in the SLM8 version we have. Do you use Snow to record your software maintenance renewal costs? If so, how? Thanks, Mary
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    SamuelBaughan
    8 years ago
    Hi Mary, We do use Snow to track our software maintenance costs. We have opted for the following: Because we do not want to edit 100's of records either, we have combined some of our licenses into bigger multi-seat licenses. At the license level, we add the maintenance cost in the dedicated field under the Maintenance and Support tab We keep the detail of the multiple purchases and multiple software maintenance renewal costs in a spredsheet that is linked as a document under the license By doing this, we keep a good tracking of the overall costs for a given application but we keep tracks of the details in case we need to go back to a specific transaction. To make sure the size of our DB does not grow unnecessarily, we do not attach the documents to the licence, we simply create a link to a file stored on the network. Greetings
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- Portal User
  8 years ago
  Hi Mark, ‌ That's what I'd like to be able to do; use the financial reporting from Snow. How are you recording the different $ amounts and invoice #s from the various renewals of that entitlement? Thanks, Mary
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  - Portal User
    8 years ago
    Mary, Apologies for delayed reply. I have split out the costs per license for one product and can clearly see: This then shows the total maintenance cost for this license over four years as £3174.20 and this helps us watch the increasing costs for this license (it has had extra components added, which has helped to increase the overall maintenance cost). Mark
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    Portal User
    8 years ago
    Hi Mark, ‌ Would I be correct in my assumption that to do this the licenses are set to NOT be governed by the agreement dates? If so, the renewal alert comes from the various licenses and not the agreement record? And the agreement record is mainly just for grouping the licenses visually? Thanks, Mary
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    Portal User
    8 years ago
    I have it set to use the Agreement periods
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    Portal User
    8 years ago
    I thought when I tried to add those multiple renewal rows that it wouldn't allow me to also say according to agreement. But maybe I didn't try to push the envelope. I'll explore this again. Thanks Mark!
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