Select the devices, or Spots, covered by the contract's maintenance work. Task settings define the content, responsibilities and schedule of future tasks. A separate task is created for each Spot selected in a setting on every creation date.
Before configuring the settings
Configure the settings in the browser. Your organisation must have the contracts feature enabled, and you need permission to edit the contract and access the maintenance targets and responsible parties you will use. Using products may also require permission to view products. For background on enabling the feature and entering basic information, see creating a customer contract.
You must select a customer and a start date for the contract before adding maintenance targets. The folder containing a maintenance target's Spot must belong to the same customer as the contract. If no Spots are available for selection, check the customer's folders, the Spots in them and your access permissions.
Add maintenance targets and a task setting
- In the browser menu, open Customers → Contracts, open the contract by clicking its name, and go to the Contract maintenance targets tab.
- Enable Create tasks related to contract and select Select new maintenance targets.
- In the folder tree, select the Spots that should share the same task content and schedule. Select Add task settings to selected spots.
- In the setting that opens, fill in Task details, define responsibilities and resourcing, and complete Maintenance program settings. Add any required products in the Product Settings section.
- Check the creation dates and due dates in the maintenance program preview. You can change the end date of the preview in the Fetch upcoming creation dates up to this date field.
- Select Continue at the bottom of the setting. This returns the setting to the contract form. Save the changes to the service using the Save button on the contract form.
If maintenance targets need different work, responsible parties or schedules, add separate task settings for them. Enabling task creation requires at least one task setting, and each setting must contain at least one Spot.
Open an existing setting from the Selected contract maintenance targets and task settings table by clicking the task name or the pencil icon on the row. The view button in the table's Upcoming creation dates column opens a schedule preview. It is unavailable for an ended, archived or deleted contract.
Task content and products
In the Task details section, give the task a clear name and a description containing the information needed to carry out the work. Select a task form, work order and categories if needed. The form and work order are optional; a selectable form must be enabled and a selectable work order must be open.
The The task must be reviewed before completion option makes review mandatory for future tasks. Billable marks the task as billable; contract invoice creation is configured separately. See contract billing and price changes.
Open Product Settings → Products and select Add new product if the task includes products. Select a product and enter a quantity greater than zero. Specify a warehouse and warehouse slot if needed. A purchase batch is not selected in a contract task setting.
When a task is created, its name, description, form, work order, review requirement, billable status, products and categories are copied from the settings in effect at that time. Product rows and quantities are copied to the task created for each selected Spot. Changing the settings later does not update these details in tasks that have already been created.
Responsible party and default resourcing
In the setting's Task details section, open Responsibility and schedule and its Default resourcing option. This defines the responsible party for future tasks and the working time planned for users. You can select one role, one or more users, or the users of a role.
- Attach for role assigns responsibility for the task to a role. This option does not create resourcing times for individual users.
- Attach for the users of role assigns responsibility for the task to the users of a role. The future task includes the users who belong to the role when the task is created, and resourcing is created for each user. The followed role must have users when the setting is saved.
- Selecting individual users assigns responsibility for the task to the selected people and creates resourcing for them.
Resourcing for each user starts at the selected time of day, the specified number of days before the task's due date. The resourcing duration determines the end time. This planned working time is separate from Task duration, which determines the task's due date, and from Task lead time, which shifts the task's creation date.
Creation dates and the due date
Define the schedule in the setting's Maintenance program settings section. A new setting proposes recurrence every three months, a lead time of zero months, and the day of the month of the first creation date for subsequent creation dates. The default task duration is three months, and the default due date is the last day of the target month. All weekdays and months are initially allowed. The proposed first creation date is the contract's start date, or tomorrow if the start date has already passed. Check all defaults before saving.
First task will be created is the date of the first creation run. It must fall within the contract period and must be today or later when set. Lead time and weekday or month restrictions do not apply to the first creation date, so choose a suitable date yourself. If you select today, task creation starts in the background after the contract is saved. Other creation runs are processed automatically at midnight on the creation date in the service's time zone.
You can define the recurrence interval in days, weeks, months or years. The interval must be a positive integer. Lead time and task duration must be integers of zero or greater. These numbers must be less than 2000.
When calculating the next creation date, the recurrence interval is added to the starting date and Task lead time is subtracted from the result. If the date is not an allowed weekday, it is moved to the next allowed weekday. The month restriction applies to the resulting final creation date. If the month is not allowed, the calculation continues to the next date produced by the recurrence interval.
Choose the allowed months deliberately. Saving requires at least one month and one weekday to be selected, so clearing all selections does not allow all dates. The lead time must not be so large that the next creation date fails to advance beyond the previous one.
If you use The next creation date is always a specific day of the month, both the recurrence interval and the lead time interval must be in months. In this case, the selected day of the month overrides the weekday restriction. If the selected day does not exist in a month, the last day of the month is used. For a schedule recurring in days or weeks, lead time can only be defined in days.
Task duration is added to the creation date in days or months. When using months, you can also select The due date of the created task is always a specific day of the month; if the day does not exist in a month, the last day of the month is used. Weekday and month restrictions do not shift the due date. Selecting daily or weekly recurrence also changes the task duration unit to days on the form. Changing the lead time or task duration unit resets the corresponding number to zero, so check the values after making changes.
Contract period end restriction: when looking for the next creation date, the date produced by the recurrence interval is compared with the contract's end date before subtracting lead time or making other date adjustments. If this date falls outside the contract period, no subsequent creation run is scheduled, even if the lead time would shift the creation date into the contract period. This calculation does not limit the task's due date to the end of the contract period, so the due date may fall after the contract ends.
Check the schedule and the created tasks
Schedule limitation: the Upcoming creation dates preview and automatic creation do not match for all settings. Automatic creation calculates the next date from the previous final creation date, while the preview continues the recurrence interval without carrying over the previous run's lead time or weekday adjustment.
For example, a first creation date of 1 October, a recurrence interval of seven days and a lead time of two days produce automatic creation dates of 1 October, 6 October and 11 October when all months and weekdays are allowed. The third date in the preview is 13 October. The preview may also differ from automatic creation at the end of the period, because it compares the adjusted creation date with the preview's end date.
Save the contract and reopen it. Check Next task will be created in the settings table on the Contract maintenance targets tab. After a creation run, also check the contract's Tasks tab for each Spot to confirm that the tasks have been created and their due dates and responsibilities are correct. Click a task's name to open its detailed information and resourcing.
The next creation date advancing does not by itself confirm that all tasks were created successfully: failure to create a task for an individual Spot does not prevent the setting's schedule from advancing. The task list only shows tasks you have permission to access. If the view reports missing permissions, ask a user with sufficient permissions to check the full set of tasks. If a task is still missing after checking permissions, investigate its creation with support.
Bulk changes to task responsibilities
You can use a bulk change to change the responsible party for future tasks across several contracts at once. You need permission to edit the contracts being changed and access the responsible party you select.
- In the contract list, select the contracts to change using the row checkboxes. Open the Actions menu in the checkbox column header and select Update contracts.
- On the update form, enable Change task responsible to.
- In the responsible party selector that appears, select a new role, the users of a role, or individual users.
- Start the update using the form's Update contracts button and check the settings after background processing finishes.
This option replaces the previous responsible parties in all task settings of the selected contracts. It does not add a new responsible party alongside the existing ones. The change only applies to contracts that have Create tasks related to contract enabled and have task settings. If you disable task creation in the same bulk change, the responsible parties are not changed. Archived and deleted contracts are not processed. An ended contract can be edited in bulk, but it does not create new tasks.
When selecting users or the users of a role, each task setting's previous resourcing lead time, start time and duration are transferred to the new users. If a setting has several user-specific times, the values from the first user's resourcing are applied to all new users. If there are no values, for example because responsibility was previously assigned to a role, the service's default resourcing settings are used. When assigning responsibility to a role, user-specific resourcing settings are removed from that task setting.
The update runs in the background. The notification that processing has started does not yet confirm that all contracts have been changed. If updating one contract's settings fails, its changes are rolled back and processing continues for the other contracts. Therefore, check the outcome in the contracts' task settings.
Task responsible in the contract list describes the responsibility defined in the task settings. Multiple means that different task settings in the contract have different responsibility selections. An empty field does not by itself mean that a responsible party is missing: the information is also hidden, for example, when task creation is disabled or when you lack permission to view the responsible parties.
Existing tasks and stopping task creation
Changing contract task responsibilities in bulk does not change the responsible parties or resourcing of tasks that have already been created. It also does not change their status, completion details or previous task history. If the worker also changes for existing work, change those tasks' responsibilities separately. See setting a task's responsible party.
The name, due date, Spot, task form, work order, review requirement or billable status of a task created from a contract cannot be changed afterwards. The task also cannot be deleted, moved to planning or put on hold, or made independently recurring. Check these details before the first creation run.
To stop future creation for one setting, open the setting and its Maintenance program settings section. Stop creating tasks appears when the setting has a next creation date and you have permission to edit it. Confirm that you want to stop creation, select Continue in the setting, and save the contract. Existing tasks remain, and the contract's other task settings may continue to create tasks.
Changing the responsible party in bulk does not restart creation for a stopped task setting. However, changing the creation schedule, allowed weekdays or allowed months may calculate a new creation date for it. The calculation may then start from the first creation date, so check the next date again after saving.
If you clear Create tasks related to contract for the entire contract and save, the next creation dates are cleared for all its task settings. The settings and existing tasks remain. To enable creation again, the first creation dates in the retained settings must not be in the past; check them and change them if necessary before enabling creation.
Removing a Spot from the setting's Spots for which tasks will be created selection stops new task creation only for that Spot after saving. Its previous tasks remain. A task setting cannot be deleted if tasks have already been created from it.
Ending or archiving a contract stops future creation. Normal automatic creation processes contracts that create tasks and have the status Waiting for start date, Active or Waiting for end date. Check open tasks separately if the operation of the entire maintenance contract changes. See also contract history and archiving.
Contract information on mobile
On Android and iOS, Show contract in the Spot's details opens a summary of its related contracts when contract information is available. The summary shows the contract's name, status, start date and end date. Use the browser to configure maintenance targets, task settings and bulk changes.