🀝Agreements

Agreements are a key component of the Octoo application where a partner can describe the rates and terms for their customers and providers.

In SkepAlpha, we have renamed ServiceAgreement to Agreement because some agreements have nothing to do with services (they belong to reservations or schedules). This resulted in a change to some acronyms as well: an "RSA" is now going to be a "PRA" or "Provider Reservation Agreement".

An agreement is a collection of rates and terms that define what a customer will be charged and a provider will bill for services provided. An agreement can be attached to services, opportunities, schedules, or reservations.

When a customer makes a new request the Octoo application will attempt to auto-bind the customer's in effect agreement to the services (and schedules) of the request. The same is true for when a provider expresses interest in a service: an in-effect agreement should be automatically attached. Reservations also use agreements.

If a particular request requires unique rates or terms, a partner can modify that request's one-off agreement. These new rates/terms will only apply to that request. A one-off agreement can be labeled and re-used if it is needed. The service/opportunity always gets its rates and terms from the attached agreement.

Features

  • Zone based

  • Minimum in minutes

  • Floor in minutes

  • Mileage rate types (e.g., "Federal")

  • Auto-binding vs one-off

  • Pay schedules (e.g., office hours and after hours)

  • Base service rates

  • Add-on rates (e.g., holiday, legal)

  • Time-based policies (e.g., cancellation or short notice)

  • Slip policies (e.g., mileage, tolls, parking, travel, prep)

A zone is a collection of compatible agreements

A zone is a service area defined by a partner that contains a collection of providers and customers with compatible rates and terms.

An agreement will be bound to a service/opportunity based on a matching zone (formerly catchment area).

SkepAlpha relies on a zone slightly differently than our legacy system. In our legacy system we used a "service agreement location" and radius in addition to the zone. However, this approach caused confusion and unexpected outcomes when agreements had overlapping phsyical radiuses. In SkepAlpha, an agreement is bound only by zone. Not only does this make things more straightforward when figuring out where agreements belong, it also significantly speeds up our API's ability to identify and diagnose which agreement to automatically bind to a service. If a service is in "Zone A" then we look for agreements in "Zone A".

For example: if Customer A and Provider B have agreements in "Zone Bay Area" we would expect both agreements to be (mostly) compatible in terms of slip, cancellation, short notice, and other policies and features of the agreements. That is: Provider B should be able to work for Customer A.

If Customer C has an agreement in "Zone Washington State" we wouldn’t consider Provider B because the rates/terms are too different between the two zones (e.g., appearance fees, minimums, booking charges, etc are different in Washington than the Bay Area).

So that’s generally the concept of a zone: collection of compatible rates/terms between customers and providers.

Auto-binding vs one-off

SkepAlpha introduces a new concept with agreements: auto-bindable and one-off/manually-assigned.

An auto-bindable agreement is the one that our system will automatically attach to new services/opportunities in the same zone and for the appropriate provider types. An auto-bindable agreement has an in effect date and only one can exist for a particular zone.

A one-off (manually assigned) agreement is on that a partner administrator can manually assign to a service/opportunity as needed (we call it one-off but it is re-usable).

For example, Customer A allows providers to charge prep timeβ€”but only for certain requests. We would create a second agreement (called: "Customer A w/Prep Time") and make the required changes to this agreement to reflect prep time. This second agreement would not be auto-bindable. As needed, admins could swap the travel time agreement into a service.

A customer or provider can only have one auto-bindable agreement for a given criteria. This way our system always knows which one to bind based on the date of the service.

Minimum floor in minutes

This is a little counter intuitive but it works in the same as the minimum_in_minutes only by setting a floor. For example, if the minimum_floor_in_minutes = 60 (most common) this means the provider will not have any service slips for a job that is less than one hour long. It makes sense to be used in conjunction with another slip policy (e.g., in the case a 1.5 hour appearance fee charge). So if a provider works for only 30 minutes they would not bill any service slips (they would just get the "appearance fee" slip, from the example above). If they worked for 1.5 hours then would bill for 0.5 hours of service slips.

Base Service Rate

The base service rate is the primary rate charged for the services provided. Most partners will utilize only one base service rate; however, you can specific more than one (e.g., "regular" and "recurring"). Regardless, on base service rate must be set as the default rate.

Add-On Rate

An add-on rate "adds" to the base service rate. You can stack them. Services and opportunities have add-on rates applied to them based on criteria (e.g., holidays or corresponding with certain qualifications). An add-on rate can be waived (service-level or opportunity-level).

If a provider agreement or customer agreement does not support the add-on rate it will still be applied. So a "holiday" will always appear tagged on the service/opportunity a "holiday add-on rate" even if there is no change to what the customer/provider is being charged.

Time-based Policy

In SkepAlpha, short notice policies and cancellation policies are now grouped under a single concept called a "time-based" policy.

A time-based policy is applied via one of three different methods: flat rate, pay schedule, or percentage.

  1. FLAT RATE: a new slip is added to the proforma invoice for the flat rate amount. If a flat rate policy is waived a second slip will be added to reverse the charge. When a cancellation policy is flat rate no additional service slips are added (the flat rate takes the place of the service slips). A short notice flat rate is added in adddition to the regular service slips.

  2. PERCENTAGE: [CANCELLATION ONLY] applies a discount to each service slip on the proforma invoice. This discount reflects the percentage of the policy. If the policy is 100% no discount is applied and each service slip is charged in full. If the cancellation policy is set to be 50% then the service slips would be discounted by 50%. NOTE: we currently do not support short notice percentage based policies.

  3. RATE TABLE (Add-On): [SHORT NOTICY ONLY] the rate table is consulted for this policy and is treated like an "add-on" rate increasing the serivce slip total. NOTE: we currently do not support cancellation rate table based policies.

When a service/opportunity is created or cancelled time-based policies are automatically applied. They can also be waived. Unlike an add-on rate, a time-based policy is not applied unless the agreement calls for it.

Pay Schedule

In SkepAlpha we are introducing a new concept called pay schedules. In the legacy application these schedules were hard coded and inflexible; now, partners can define their own "hours of operation" and break-up the work week how they see fit.

Each account defines their own pay schedule (and there can be more than one). For example, perhaps an account has one "default" pay schedule that includes "weekday, "weeknight", and "weekend" rates. They may have a second pay schedule that only defines "office hours" and "after hours" rates.

Slip Policies

In SkepAlpha, partners define the different type of slip policies they wish to support at an account level before applying them to agreements. This makes comparisons between agreements much easier!

A slip policy defines how certain slips on the proforma invoices will be handles. Both provider agreements and customer agreements define their own slip policies and they can be contigent on one another.

The following slip types can have policies: mileage, parking, tolls, travel time, prep time, booking charges, appearance fees. The policy can also have a term that restricts its usage. A policy can have a minimum, a maximum, a floor, and a fixed amount. For example, here are some possible combinations:

  • "Mileage - unrestricted"

  • "Mileage - maximum of 100 miles" (cannot bill over 100)

  • "Mileage - floor of 40 miles" (starts billing only after reaching 40 miles)

  • "Booking charge - $30 flat rate"

A slip policy can also be contingent on the other party's policy. For example, the provider's agreement may have a "Mileage policy - contingent on customer". This means that if the customer supports paying for the mileage the provider can bill for it. However, if the customer does not, the provider cannot.

If a slip policy is not contingent that means the provider/customer will always have it applied to their invoices.

One-way billing

A slip policy can have one-way billing. This means that the policy will not be shared between customer and provider.

For example, a customer may have an internal policy that does not allow mileage to be included on their invoices. The one-way billing feature allow partners to circumvent it by paying providers the milage directly (one-way) without billing the customer.

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