Organizations use buy-side contracts when they act as the buyer of goods or services. This feature introduces buy-side contracting capabilities, where suppliers serve as the primary counterparties.

Buy-side contracts differ from sell-side contracts as follows:

• Buy-side uses Supplier and Supplier Contact.
• Sell-side continues to use Account and Primary Contact.

Role-based access control ensures that only authorized users initiate buy-side contracting.

After approvers mark a supplier as ready for contracting, you can create new contracts using the Purchase Agreement record type. This is a seeded record type for buy-side contracts. Users can also clone this record type and create additional record types with buy-side intent as needed. For this record type, the system auto-populates the Supplier and Supplier Contact fields instead of account-based fields. Supplier Contact defaults to the primary contact.

Currently, the system does not restrict contract creation based on supplier status. You can generate a contract even if the supplier is not yet active or approved, as agreements such as Non-Disclosure Agreements (NDAs) are sometimes generated before supplier approval.

Administrators can configure lookup criteria in Admin Console > Schema Manager. For example, they can restrict the supplier lookup to active supplier contacts (Status = Approved or Status = Active). In that case, you see only active contacts of a supplier. By default, the lookup shows only active contacts; inactive contacts are excluded from the lookup. If a contact later becomes inactive, existing contracts remain unaffected, but inactive contacts no longer appear in lookup. There is no restriction on inactive suppliers.

When you create a contract for the Purchase Agreement record type, the system links it to the supplier through a Supplier Code, which ensures traceability. To know more on how to create buy-side contracts in Supplier page, see Contracts topic in Supplier Management.

The contract record is visible in the Contracts tab of a supplier record. The contract then follows the standard contract lifecycle. You can generate documents with buy-side templates, and the system stores them in the Contracts > Documents tab. You can proceed to review, sign, regenerate, upload, preview, activate, or apply post-lifecycle updates. For the complete set of contract lifecycle steps, see Contract Lifecycle Management.

The activity history provides a chronological record of all actions associated with a contract's lifecycle, with filtering available for specific events or user actions.

Related contracts for Purchase Agreements are displayed using supplier-based hierarchy. To learn more, see Related Contracts.