NOTE: This feature is only available for customers on Common Paper's Growth and Enterprise plans. Click here for more information.

Once you've signed your first Cloud Service Agreement (CSA) or Software License Agreement (SoLA) with a customer, with luck you'll be faced with sending a renewal or an upsell to extend or enhance the relationship.

What's the difference between a CSA/SoLA and a renewal/upsell CSA/SoLA?

The key difference between a regular CSA/SoLA and an upsell/renewal CSA/SoLA lies with what terms are shown. The initial agreement with a customer contains two parts: (1) an order form that lays out the business terms, and (2) key terms that include the legal terms (things like governing law and indemnification).

When sending a renewal or upsell, there's an assumption that the original key terms will stay the same. So the renewal or upsell contains just the business terms (the order form) and incorporates the original key terms. In Common Paper, we refer to this as an order form only agreement. By including these terms by reference, it often makes the renewal or upsell process quicker and easier because you and your customer are working from legal terms that have already been agreed upon.

Common Paper makes it easy to send order form only agreements.

From a Completed CSA/SoLA

Once everyone has signed a CSA/SoLA, the options to create a supplemental order form only agreement become available on the agreement history page.

There are two ways to initiate the new agreement - either click on the Issue a new Order Form link under other actions:

Or click on issue a new Order Form link under Related agreements.

Once you've clicked either link, you'll be taken to the new order form, which will be prefilled with the information from the original agreement (as a starting point).

From an Uploaded CSA/SoLA

If you wish to send a renewal or upsell for a Common Paper CSA/SoLA that has been signed outside of Common Paper, start by uploading the agreement. Be sure to save the agreement with an Agreement Type of Cloud Service Agreement or Software License Agreement.

Once you've uploaded your agreement, click into the agreement history page, and you'll see similar options as those above.

Once you've clicked either link, you'll be asked to choose the template to use. Since you uploaded the agreement as a file, we need to know which CSA/SoLA template it is patterned after so that we can create the proper order form.

The process of creating a renewal / upsell order form is very similar to creating a normal CSA/SoLA, and all of the regular features such as reminder notifications, expiration dates, automatic billing, etc. all work with renewal/upsell agreements.

There are two key differences on this page:

Once you've completed your updates to the renewal/upsell form, you can send it. Your recipient will be notified and the agreement will follow the normal Common Paper agreement flow.

Your counterparty will receive the agreement as normal, and when they view it they will see the reference to the previous agreement, as well as a link to that agreement.

NOTE: Recipients will be able to open and view the original agreement linked here, regardless of whether they were involved in signing the agreement.

Once a renewal or upsell is sent, it will appear in the agreements list page like any other agreement, but will be marked as an Order Form.

Clicking into the agreement's history page will allow you to perform any of the normal functions available for in-flight agreements.

Additionally, you'll be able to see a tree-view of the agreement and its parent agreement.

Common Paper supports sending multiple agreements from the same parent agreement. The process is the same as above. As you generate and sign more and more supplemental agreements, they will be reflected in the Related Agreements section of the original CSA/SoLA.