Contracts

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Contracts in Flowtly define the financial terms of your engagements — a structured set of payment schedule lines, optionally linked to a budget. Each contract specifies when payments are due, their amounts, and the direction (supplier invoice or client billing), giving you full visibility over committed cash flows.

Key concepts

  • Payment schedule lines — individual line items defining amount, due date, and payment direction (supplier or client)
  • Budget linkage — a contract can optionally be attached to one or more budgets, which act as the financial envelope for the engagement
  • Direction — supplier contracts track costs you owe; client contracts track revenue you expect to receive
  • Cyclic flag — a contract can be marked cyclic to indicate a recurring/ongoing relationship; this is advisory only, and payment lines are still created one at a time rather than auto-generated from an interval
  • Document attachments — attach signed contract files, amendments, or supporting documents directly to the contract record
  • Payment terms — how long the counterparty has to pay, what that period is counted from, and whether payment falls due in advance or in arrears
  • Counterparty — who the contract is with. Optional: a contract can be created and kept without one
  • Automatic reading — upload a signed contract and Flowtly reads the parties, dates, payment terms and prices from it. You can run the reading again at any time from the contract's documents, for example after correcting a scan
  • Rates and total value — some contracts never state a total. A lease priced per m² states a rate, an area and a term, and the total is not written down anywhere. Flowtly records the rate exactly as the contract prints it and leaves the total empty rather than inventing a figure; enter the term and it offers a calculated total you can accept

What a budget needs from a contract

Two things, and a contract that is missing either contributes nothing to planning. First, the budget has to be able to reach the contract: through the project the contract is linked to, by attaching the contract to that budget directly, or through budget tags. Second, the contract needs a schedule — the budget reads the payment schedule lines, so a contract with none adds no planned figures however it is linked. Neither a document nor a counterparty is required for any of this: you can record an agreement you have no file for, and one whose other party is not yet decided, and it will still plan.

A contract does not need a counterparty

The counterparty field is optional, and leaving it empty is a legitimate, lasting state rather than an unfinished one.

Plenty of real contracts exist before the other side does:

  • a tender that has been submitted and not yet awarded
  • a tenancy whose current tenant is expected to be replaced
  • a cost fixed by an official decision — a levy, a permit, a rate set by an authority — where there is no supplier to name at all

In each case the amounts, the dates and the direction are known and worth planning against long before a name is. Create the contract now and add the counterparty when there is one to add.

A contract can also become counterparty-less on its own: if the counterparty record is later deleted, its contracts survive and simply lose the link. Nothing is removed and no payment schedule line is affected.

Two limits worth knowing:

  • The contracts list cannot yet filter for "no counterparty". You can filter to a particular counterparty, but not to the absence of one. Sorting the list by counterparty groups the empty ones together, which is the nearest thing available today.
  • Everything else on the contract still applies. Name, direction and currency are required as usual; only the counterparty is optional.

Payment terms

A contract states three things about when its invoices fall due, and Flowtly holds each one separately rather than collapsing them into a single number:

  • Payment deadline (days) — the number of days allowed.
  • Counted from — the date the deadline runs from: Invoice delivery, Invoice issue, Start of period, or An event. Delivery and issue are kept apart deliberately, because they are genuinely different dates and many contracts bind the former.
  • Payment — whether the amount is due in advance or in arrears.

An empty deadline means the contract is silent on the subject. That is a different statement from a deadline of zero days, and a different statement again from payment in arrears — so the fields are left blank rather than defaulted, and opening a contract never writes in a term the document does not actually contain.

These fields appear both on the contract itself and on the screen where an uploaded contract is reviewed, so terms read out of the document can be checked and corrected in the same place they were found.

Contract documents

Contract and annex files are attached to the contract record and listed on it. A document can be previewed in place — the file opens in a viewer without leaving the contract — which is usually all that is needed to confirm what was signed. Anything the viewer cannot render is offered as a download instead.

A separate Download action remains alongside the preview, because getting the signed file out of Flowtly and reading it are different jobs.

Example use cases

  • Fixed-fee project billing: Create a client contract with monthly payment milestones linked to a project budget, so you always know what is invoiced and what remains.
  • Vendor retainer: Set up a supplier contract marked as cyclic for a software licence or consultancy retainer, and create each new payment line as it comes due.
  • Subcontractor payments: Link a supplier contract to a project budget to track subcontractor costs against the planned spend and ensure no line exceeds the budget ceiling.
  • Checking a term before chasing payment: Read the deadline and what it is counted from directly on the contract, rather than reopening the signed document to find the clause.
  • Confirming what was signed: Preview the attached contract file in place to check a detail, without downloading it first.

Connection map

Refers toUses upDerived fromPart of
Documented hereDocumented elsewhere
invoice billed to counterparty. invoice taxed by tax-group. cost spends against budget. cost owed to counterparty. bank-transaction reconciled to invoice. bank-connection imports bank-transaction. contract schedules payment-schedule-line. contract agreed with counterparty. contract attached to budget. budget covers project. invoice billed from project. project linked to budget. lead becomes counterparty. deal sold to counterparty.billed totaxed byspends againstowed toreconciled toimportsschedulesagreed withattached tocoversbilled fromlinked tobecomessold toIInvoice — A sales document issued to a client: line items, dates, tax. It is created, reviewed, previewed and then sent.InvoiceCCounterparty — The other side of a financial document — a client billed, or a supplier owed.CounterpartyTTax group — The tax treatment applied to a line, so rates are set once rather than per document.Tax groupCCost — Money the organisation owes or has spent, tracked against a budget.CostBBudget — The financial envelope an engagement is measured against — what was planned, versus what has actually been spent.BudgetBBank transaction — A movement on a connected bank account. Matching it to an invoice or a cost is what makes the books agree with the bank.Bank transactionBBank connection — The consented link to one bank that transactions arrive through. It can stop working on its own — a consent expires or is withdrawn — so it reports whether it is still working.Bank connectionCContract — The financial terms of an engagement: a structured set of payment schedule lines, in one direction or the other.ContractPPayment schedule line — One dated amount on a contract, in a direction — money owed to a supplier, or due from a client.Payment schedule linePProject — The core organizational unit for a business initiative, client engagement or internal work. Everything tracked — time, cost, invoicing, profitability — hangs off one.ProjectPProspect — A company you are working but that is not a customer yet. It sits at New, Contacted or Qualified, and everything done to it is logged against it.ProspectDDeal — A sale in progress: a customer, an amount, and the stage it has reached. It cannot exist without a customer, and its stage is never blank.Deal

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