Financing agreements

Financing agreements record how the equipment you buy is paid for. If you fund hardware through a bank or a leasing company rather than out of your own cash, this is where those contracts live and where purchases are tied to them.

If you buy everything outright, you never need this area.

What it buys you

Two things, both of which only work if the assignments are kept up to date.

Controlling. An agreement lists every purchase order assigned to it and exports to Excel. That gives you, per contract, exactly what was financed under it, which is the figure your finance department asks for and nobody can reconstruct afterwards.

Traceability. When a device comes back or a contract reaches its end, you can see which financing it ran against without opening a filing cabinet.

An agreement with no purchase orders assigned is an empty shell. The value is entirely in the assignment.

The collection phase is the point

This is what makes an agreement worth setting up rather than arranging financing per purchase.

Instead of one contract per device, you open a collection window, everything bought during that window is assigned to the same agreement, and the contract starts on a fixed date afterwards. Two months of purchases, one contract, one term, starting on the first of January.

That is how leasing usually works in practice, and it is the difference between one contract and forty.

The start and end of the collection phase are mandatory when you create the agreement, along with the type of financing, the contract start date and the duration. Everything else, including the provider, the limit, free months and the financing factor, is optional and can be added later.

Set up your banks and leasing companies on the Credit institutions tab first, so they can be selected rather than retyped.

Assigning purchases

Two levels, and you will use both.

The whole purchase order. Open it under Purchasing, Orders, pick the agreement in the Financing area, save. This is the normal case.

A single position. The Instances tab on the purchase order gives each instance its own financing field. Use it when one order contains items funded in different ways, which happens more often than you would expect: the notebooks on leasing, the accessories bought outright.

The assignment can be made when the order is placed or added later, so a missing agreement is never a reason to delay an order.