Contract thresholds

A threshold is a cap. You agreed to spend $400,000 with an agency over six months, or to buy no more than 5,000 units at the agreed rate. A threshold records that commitment, and Zudello accumulates spend against it as requisitions, orders and invoices are processed, so you know where you stand before the invoice that tips you over arrives.

Thresholds sit in the Contract Thresholds section on the contract. Your administrator adds that section to the contract form. See Setting up contracts.

Best practices

• Always set a Threshold Type and a Total, since a threshold without them does not behave predictably
• Set at least one dimension, because a threshold with no dimensions matches nothing
• Scope the threshold as tightly as the commitment actually is, rather than capping everything the supplier sells you
• Check the Allocation bar after saving to confirm spend is being picked up

Adding a threshold

1. Open the contract and find the Contract Thresholds section.
2. Use the Dimensions picker to choose the dimension columns you need.
3. Click Add row.
4. Enter a Description. This is what appears on documents and in approval emails, so name it the way your team talks about the commitment.
5. Choose the Threshold Type:
   • Amount accumulates the line total excluding tax, in your team's currency
   • Quantity accumulates the line quantity
6. Fill in the dimension columns that define what the cap covers.
7. Enter the Total, which is the cap itself.
8. Click Save.

(Screenshot: the Contract Thresholds grid with the Allocation bar)

The supplier or customer comes from the contract header, so you do not set it on the threshold.

Choosing dimensions

A threshold can be scoped by Account, Account Group, Item, Item Group, Item Category, Location, Subsidiary, Department, Warehouse, Zone, Cost Centre, Cost Type, Project, Project Group, Project Type, Project Task, Expense Category, Fixed Asset and Mileage Rate.

A threshold matches a document line when every dimension set on the threshold matches the line. Dimensions you leave blank are treated as any value, so the fewer you set, the more the threshold catches.

Note

You cannot set both a dimension and its parent on the same row, for example Account Group and Account, or Item Group and Item. Zudello blocks the save and tells you which pair is the problem.

One document line can count against several thresholds at once. A line for an item that sits in a capped category, on a contract that also caps that specific item, counts against both.

Reading the allocation bar

The Allocation column shows a coloured bar with a marker for the threshold total. Hovering over it breaks the spend down.

Spend is held in five buckets, which tell you how firm each amount is:

Bucket	What it holds
New spend	Spend on documents in review and ready
Pending spend	Spend on documents sitting in an approval flow
Committed spend	Spend that is committed but not yet invoiced
Actual spend	Finalised spend, excluding anything rejected or deleted
Processing spend	Spend on documents still being processed

Below the buckets you see the Total, the Total Spend, and what is Remaining. Where the cap has been passed, the bar shows how far over you are.

Exactly which document statuses feed which bucket is set by your administrator in a contract configuration, so the definitions above describe the standard setup rather than a fixed rule. See Setting up contracts.

A threshold's own status is one of:

• Under threshold, where total spend is below the total
• On threshold, where it equals the total
• Over threshold, where it exceeds the total

Note

There is no untouched state. A brand new threshold with no spend against it reads as Under threshold.

What a threshold needs to work

Thresholds are the part of contracts with the most moving pieces, and most reports of "my threshold is not tracking" come down to one of these:

• The contract's status type is active
• The contract has both an Effective Date and an Expiry Date, and the document falls inside that window
• The threshold has at least one dimension set
• The threshold has a Threshold Type and a Total
• The contract has a contract configuration that covers the module and submodule of the documents you expect to count

If spend still looks wrong, see Contract threshold is not tracking spend.

How spend is refreshed

Zudello does not recalculate every threshold each time a document changes, because that would be slow. Instead, a contract is re-linked to your transactions when you save it, which clears the existing links, finds every matching line inside the contract's date window again, and rebuilds the five spend figures.

That means saving the contract is what makes a change to dates, dimensions, totals, the supplier or the status take effect.

Note

Contracts and thresholds created through an integration or the API are not re-linked automatically. Your integration should call the relink endpoint after each sync, otherwise threshold spend shows as zero or out of date.

Need help?

Contact your organisation administrator or Zudello support for assistance with contract thresholds.