In the service industry it is not unusual for a leasing company to purchase equipment for a customer and be responsible for its maintenance. Often this requires maintaining a third party billing relationship between the service provider’s customer and the leasing company. The Astea Alliance application has a very simple approach to providing contractual service coverage for the customer equipment with contract billing sent to the leasing or holding company.
1. The first step would be to create a customer record which represents the leasing or holding company in this example, Affordable Leasing is the name of the leasing company.
2. The next step is to associate this leasing company to the customer who will be purchasing the leased equipment. The Relations page of the customer record provides the place where third party billing relationships can be established.
3. The next step is to create a Customer Contract identifying the leasing company as the customer of the contract.
4. The last step is to add Objects of Service to the Contract. When adding an Item using the Serial Number Lookup the window will display all installed items of all customers where Affordable Leasing is a Third Party billing relationship.
From this lookup all or a specified selection of installed item can be selected for the contract. Once the contract is approved and when the contract is invoiced the invoice will be created for Affordable Leasing. The actual leasing arrangement would be between the customer and the leasing company directly.
As a note, this type of contract is just for the billing of maintenance coverage for leased equipment and is not specifically an example of a “Lease” contract where the customer is invoiced directly for both the service maintenance and leasing charge which is then reimbursed to the leasing company. That’s another story for another time.
