About Serialized Contract Forms
When you sell service contracts or send renewal notices, you can print a contract form listing the agreed upon rates and terms. This eliminates the expense of pre-printed contracts.
In the Serialized application, a contract form is a combination of a Report Writer format and a special word processing text file. When you sell a contract, the system begins printing the contract form specified for that contract type. As it does, it reads the Report Writer format. When it reaches one of the special codes in the Report Writer format, it prints a section of text from the word processing file before moving to the next line in the Report Writer format.
The Serialized module includes two standard contract text files: &SERVICE and &MAINT. These files come pre-loaded on your software update. Before you can use them, you must copy the files from the software update to your system. Once you copy the files, you have two contract forms that you can use when you sell or renew contracts: the MAINT and SERVC2 forms. These forms are different versions of a service agreement. For service contracts that do not include meters, you can use the MAINT contract form. For service contracts that include meters, you can use the SERVC2 contract form.
To modify the SERVC2 and MAINT contract forms, you use two different modules. To modify the word processing text files &SERVICE and &MAINT, use the word processing and text editor programs. To modify the Report Writer format portion of the contract form, use the Report Writer module.
Note: It is not necessary to use a contract text file with a Report Writer format. Instead, you can set up an entire contract using only Report Writer. If you’re not familiar with Report Writer, large sections of text are much easier to create and modify using the word processing or text editing programs rather than Report Writer.
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