Bulk service updater

SECURITY  Security level with Can access Bulk Service Updater permission

NAVIGATION   >  Contracts >  Tools/Setup > Bulk Service Updater

NAVIGATION   > Admin > Features & Settings > Contracts & Un-Posting > Bulk Service Updater

About the bulk service updater

During periods of high inflation, the cost of contract services can go up suddenly and unexpectedly. To preserve your profit margins, you may want to raise the prices of your services for selected customers or across the board.

In Autotask, a contract service can be part of dozens or hundreds of active recurring service contracts for just as many customers. When you edit the cost or price of a service in Admin, the unit price of the service is updated for new contracts, but remains the same for existing contracts. This makes updating prices for active services in active contracts a difficult manual exercise.

This issue is addressed with the bulk service updater.

Features

The bulk service updater allows you to update services in active contracts in batches. A batch consists of one or more services associated with multiple contracts or multiple customers that are updated in the same process.

You can:

  • Select the contracts and organizations where service unit prices will be updated. You can limit the price updates to specific contracts associated with specific customers. Unlike a unit price change on the > Admin > Features & Settings > Products, Services, & Inventory > Services page which will affect all future contracts (see What happens when you edit a service?), you can be selective.
  • Modify the cost and price by
    • setting a specific cost and/or price
    • increasing the cost and/or price by a specified amount
    • increasing the cost and/or price by a certain markup percentage
    • round the updated prices to the nearest defined increment
  • Set an effective date for the cost and price changes.
  • Model the impact of the planned cost and/or price adjustment on your profitability.
  • Review the list of batch updates and make last minute exclusions.

This gives you a great deal of flexibility to react to changing market conditions.

To launch the new batch update wizard, click New Batch Update. Refer to Creating a new bulk service update batch.

Service batch updates can be viewed on the Contract Service Batch Updates list page. The table contains the following columns:

Column Name

Description

Batch ID

A system ID that when clicked opens the batch detail (batch status) page. Refer to The Batch status page.

Created

The date and time the batch was created

Completed

The date and time batch processing was completed

Effective Date

All full service periods after the effective date will have the new cost and/or price applied.

Services Updated

Lists all services that were affected by cost or price modifications

Created by

The Autotask user who initiated the batch update

Failed Updates

An integer indicating the number of instances that failed to be updated

Status

The status of the batch processing. It is one of the following:

  • Complete
  • Processing
  • Pending

The Batch <#> status page will appear after you click Confirm & Process and if you click the Batch ID hyperlink on the Contract Service Batch Updates page.

The following information is shown:

Header

  • The batch number
  • The effective date of the changes
  • The date and time the batch was created
  • The date and time batch processing was started
  • The date and time batch processing was completed

You can also filter the table by the same set of filters as on the previous grid. Refer to Bulk service updater.

Table

The table contains the ist of updated services. It can be sorted by clicking each column header.

Each record in the grid indicates the status of the update in real time. The Status column can show the following statuses:

Status name

Description

Pending

The line item is not yet processed.

Excluded

The line item was manually excluded by the user.

Auto-Excluded

If the same item is currently being processed in another batch, it is automatically excluded in the current batch.

Processing

The line item is currently being processed and the following service fields in the contract are locked:

  • price
  • cost
  • margin
  • discount

NOTE  Deletion of a service from the contract is not prohibited during processing.

Complete

The updates to this service have been successfully applied.

A note is appended to each contract that contains the following information:

  • The batch ID
  • The name of the batch creator
  • The changes that were applied

Failed

The update to the line item has failed. This should be a rare occurrence, due to a network or database error. The Reason column will display an error message.

We recommend that you try the update again.

The table can be exported and downloaded in CSV or PDF format.