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Commit a customer for a year, bill them monthly.

A contract records the agreement a subscription is sold under: how long the commitment runs, what happens when it ends, and what leaving early costs. It governs the commitment boundary and nothing else — the price, the cadence and the invoices stay with the subscription.

01The field this whole feature exists for

Term length is not billing cadence. “Annual commitment paid monthly” is a twelve-month term on a monthly subscription: twelve invoices, one commitment. Before contracts there was nowhere to put the twelve, so it lived in a spreadsheet and the renewal engine treated month thirteen exactly like month two.

Leave the term blank and the contract is evergreen — no committed span, which is the honest shape for an MSA. That is a normal contract, not an incomplete one: it records the document and its terms without publishing a boundary.

Where
  1. Clients
  2. open a client
  3. Subscriptions
  4. Contracts
  5. Record contract

Under the subscriptions rather than on Overview — a contract's whole job is to carry the committed term of the subscriptions above it.

02Record what you signed

Type
SOW, MSA, Amendment, NDA or Other. A committed term normally lives on an SOW; the MSA above it is usually evergreen.
Status
Signed, Out for signature, or Draft. Record a deal that is still out for signature — the term only starts governing renewals once you attach it.
Signed on vs. term starts
Two dates on purpose. A contract signed in January for a March go-live is the ordinary case, and only the term start anchors the commitment; the signing date is the record of when the relationship began.
Term (months)
How long the commitment runs. Blank means evergreen. The end date is derived from the term start, so it moves when either changes — and a term edit re-derives the boundary on every subscription the contract covers.
At the end of the term
Ends, renews automatically, or renews unless notice is given — with the notice days when that is the answer. Section 04 is what each one does.
If they leave early
A default for a cancellation, not the answer. Leave it silent and a cancellation inside a committed term has to state a policy of its own — section 05.

03Attach it to a subscription

Recording a contract commits nothing. Attaching it is what publishes a committed boundary onto a subscription — and it never touches that subscription’s service or invoice dates. Rewriting those from a document date would re-bill periods that have already been invoiced.

Where
  1. Clients
  2. open a client
  3. Subscriptions
  4. Contracts
  5. the contract row
  6. Attach

Attaching is a change to an existing subscription, so it happens here rather than in the create wizard — create the subscription, then attach it in the card underneath.

One contract may cover many subscriptions. A subscription takes its committed term from exactly one contract, because a commitment boundary has to have a single source — detach the first before attaching a second. The refusals worth knowing about:

A term the cadence cannot express
A 13-month commitment on a quarterly subscription has no boundary to land on — 4.33 periods either under-bills the commitment or bills past the end of the contract, and there is no third answer. Pick a term the cadence divides into. Twelve months on a monthly plan, the case this field exists for, divides cleanly.
A term that outlives service
A subscription with auto-renew off ends at its current period end. A commitment running past that has the two records promising different things about the same months, so it is refused rather than reconciled.
Nothing left to govern
A cancelled or expired subscription has no renewal boundary left, and a cancelled or expired contract commits nothing. Neither can be attached — so neither is offered.
A commitment across clients
A contract belongs to one client and can only cover that client’s subscriptions.

04What happens at the committed end

The contract governs the commitment boundary only. Ordinary period boundaries inside the term stay with the subscription’s own auto-renew setting — and a contract narrows a renewal rather than forcing one: it can stop or gate a renewal, never compel one the subscription would not have made.

  1. 1
    Renews automatically for another term
    The commitment rolls into its next term at the boundary. The signing date never moves — the term count goes up and the end date is re-derived from it, so “which year of this contract are we in” stays answerable from the document. One contract covering several subscriptions rolls once for the boundary they all cross, not once per subscription.
  2. 2
    Ends — the commitment simply runs out
    The subscription does not renew past the boundary. Revvly also declines to invoice a period in advance once that period starts past the committed end, because the money would be collected for a term nobody has agreed to yet.
  3. 3
    Renews unless notice is given
    Once the notice window opens — the committed end less the notice days — Revvly raises one item in the renewal approval queue, and the boundary is blocked until somebody decides it. A decision nobody was asked for is not a decision, which is why the notice pass and the block are two halves of the same posture. Running daily through a 60-day window raises exactly one item, not sixty.
Where
  1. Renewals
  2. the approval queue

Where a notice-period decision lands. It is the same queue an operator already works from, so a committed term does not add a surface.

Set the term start on a period boundary where you can. The boundary Revvly acts on is the first period end at or after the committed end — a term ending on the 15th under a subscription anchored to the 1st is reached at the following month end. For an auto-renewing term that is immaterial. For “Ends” and “Renews unless notice is given” it means one extra period is billed before the contract’s own terms are consulted. Ending short of a committed term and billing a period past one are both wrong in ways only you can choose between, so Revvly does neither silently: it logs the misalignment where it happens.

05What leaving early costs

Ending a subscription with uninvoiced periods still inside a committed term asks for a policy, and refuses to proceed without one. The dialog states the exposure first — how many periods remain, when the commitment ends, and what is owed — so the choice is made against a figure rather than a feeling.

Where
  1. Subscriptions
  2. open a subscription
  3. End subscription

The policy recorded on the contract is the default. Whoever cancels can override it — the contract is what was agreed, the cancellation is what happened.

  1. 1
    Charge the remainder now
    Invoices the owed periods as a one-time termination fee. Service still ends at the current period end, and the fee never enters MRR — it is not recurring revenue.
  2. 2
    Keep billing to the committed end
    The subscription stays active and keeps billing period by period until the term runs out, then ends. Every month of revenue is backed by a real invoice, which is the posture finance usually prefers.
  3. 3
    Waive the remainder
    Charges nothing. The amount written off is recorded on the cancellation, so the waiver reads as a decision rather than an oversight.

A prepaid span is the mirror image: the money is already in, so the question is whether any of it goes back. That is the commitment posture on the schedule — binding, refundable, or neither — and a refundable one issues a credit note for the whole periods the customer paid for and will not consume, components paid ahead included. See billing schedules.

06Changing or retiring a contract

Editing the term
Re-derives the boundary on every attached subscription in the same write, so the two copies cannot disagree. The same fit checks apply, so a term edit cannot be used to reach a state an attach would have refused. Clearing the term makes the contract evergreen and lifts the boundary everywhere.
Detaching
Clears the link and the committed boundary together. The subscription goes back to renewing on its own auto-renew setting.
Marking it cancelled or expired
Refused while it still covers subscriptions — their boundaries would go on gating renewals against a document that is over. Detach them first; quietly lifting commitments off several subscriptions as a side effect of a status edit is not something anyone asked for.

07Sub-processor and breach terms

A contract can also carry two operational terms, so that “which clients do I tell, and how soon” is a lookup rather than a reading of PDFs. For sub-processor changes, record what the client is owed before a new sub-processor starts: to be told, to be told and allowed to object within some days, or to agree first, with the days of notice and how notice is given. For breach notification, record the hours after you become aware, or leave the hours blank when the contract gives no number.

Type them in
On a client’s contracts card, Add terms (or Edit terms) opens the two terms for that contract. A term the contract does not state stays blank, which is different from a contract nobody has checked yet.
Read them from a PDF
Mark a PDF as Contract on the client’s Documents tab, including a file from their Google Drive folder, and choose Read terms. Revvly suggests the terms and shows what it read. Nothing is saved until you check them against the contract and press Save terms, which records the contract, or updates the one already made from that file. A value it was unsure of is left blank rather than guessed. Needs the CRM add-on.
See them across clients
Contracts, then Clauses across clients, lists every client bound by a signed contract with its terms and its DPO contacts. Filter by sub-processor changes or breach notification. A client with no terms recorded reads Not checked, and one whose contract is silent reads Not stated. Label a contact dpo to have them listed as the person to tell.