Hire Insurance

Overview

This guide will cover the creation of hire insurance charges that can then be added to hire contracts and which will charge a percentage of the calculated hire charges each time that a hire contract is invoiced.  These charges can be limited to specific hire categories and overrides for insurance settings can be defined at the customer level.

Configuration - Hire Insurance

The Hire Insurance menu found in Syrinx SP Configuration\'Hire/Sales' lists all of the different types of insurance, and the default settings for account and cash customers:

From here, you can add, amend or enable/disable the different types of hire insurance for use in Syrinx. 

Amend Hire Insurance Type – Details tab

The Description is the text that will be shown on the contract and invoice, with the percentage shown in place of the “|1 “ placeholder token.

You can specify default percentages for cash and account customers, and whether or not insurance is charged (i.e. added to the contract) by default.  These default settings can be overridden on a customer by customer basis.

For the ‘Charge by Default’ setting, the ‘Prompt’ entry means that the user will be prompted when each new contract is entered.  The ‘Yes’ setting means that the insurance charge will be added automatically to each contract without prompting the user.  The ‘No’ setting means that the insurance charge will not be added to the contract

You can set the nominal code and/or tax code against the insurance type, plus a minimum charge to apply.  Ticking the ‘Exclude Hire Discount?’ box means that the insurance percent will be applied to the pre-discount charge (as opposed to the actual/discounted charge) on those hire items that have a hire discount percent set.

The ‘Parent Type’ box lets you link an insurance type with another, so that it is automatically added to a contract if its parent type is added.  This may be used where a hire insurance charge is split into two sub-components that have their own description, percentage and tax code settings.

Amend Hire Insurance Type – Categories tab

By default, an insurance type applies to all hire categories: 

You can, however, indicate that it applies only to a given set of categories by picking the ‘Only Categories in Given List’ option, and then using the ‘Add Categories’ button to pick those categories it applies to:

The ‘Ins%’ boxes let you set insurance charge percentages for each individual category.  Note that if you override the insurance percentages here, and if a contract has hire items that are charged insurance at different percentages, the highest percentage will be used to charge all hire items on the contract.  If this behaviour is not desired, then you should set up separate insurance types for each different percentage to be used, and link each insurance type to the corresponding categories; this way if a contract contains items charged at different percentages, then separate insurance lines will be added to the contract (and invoice).

The ‘Print Document’ tab lets you associate the insurance type with a pdf file that is to be printed with each new hire contract, if, for example, a customer is to be given printed terms & conditions for the insurance.

Overriding Insurance on each Customer

As detailed above, you can set on the configuration of each Insurance Type the percentage to charge, and the default charging (Yes/No/Prompt) for both account and cash customers, plus you can also set a minimum charge.  These settings can be overridden on individual customers if required, using the ‘Hire Insurance’ tab on the Amend Customers screen:

If the ‘Charge’ is set to ‘Default’ then the setting against the Insurance Type will be used.  Similarly if the Ins Pct or Min Charge is left blank, then the setting on the Insurance Type (or category override) will be used.

Contract Entry

If there are any applicable Insurance Types for the hire contract, then these are shown on the Insurance tab:

‘Applicable’ types are enabled Insurance Types whose charge setting is not ‘No’, and that are applicable to at least one or all item son the contract.

Here you can see which insurance types apply to the contract, and you can choose to charge or not charge as appropriate.   If there is a single applicable insurance type whose ‘Charge’ setting is set to ‘Prompt’ then the system will prompt the user ‘Do you want to charge for Insurance on this contract?’.  If there is more than one type set to ‘Prompt’ then the ‘Insurance’ tab will be displayed, and the user can tick the type(s) to be charged for. 

If the user responds ‘No’ to the ‘Do you want to charge insurance’ question, and if the contract is left unconfirmed, then the system will not re-prompt when the contract is later printed or confirmed.

To determine the insurance settings, the system will first read the global attributes of the insurance type, and then these will get overridden by any category attributes or customer attributes that have been set individually.  The insurance is worked out on the total charge for the hire items it applies to.  

Each individual insurance type on the contract will appear as a separate line on the invoice. 

Insurance Charging During Public Holidays and Suspense Days

From Syrinx version 4.39.1, the system can now be set to ignore suspense days/public holidays when generating hire insurance charges on hire contracts for cases where the user still wishes to generate an insurance charge even though there may not be an actual hire charge for a particular date.  As insurance was traditionally charged as a percentage of the invoiced hire charges, the system will now calculate the hire charges without suspense days/public holidays and will then calculate the insurance charge from this value instead of the amount actually being charged to the customer which will be reduced by the number of suspense days/public holidays in the period being invoiced.  

This feature is enabled on the "Misc" tab of Syrinx SP Configuration\System Options\Hire Charging via a new system option "Allow Hire Insurance to Exclude Suspensions":

Once enabled, an "Exclude Hire Suspensions?" option can then be enabled against the specific insurance entries in Syrinx Configuration\"Hire/Sales"\Insurance:

Once enabled, any new or unconfirmed contracts which include the insurance item will observe the new setting once those contracts are confirmed and begin invoicing.  Open Contracts which have not been invoiced and to which the insurance item has been added via the "Amend Hire Contract" screen will also observe the new functionality as long as the insurance item was added after the new functionality was enabled.  Any open contracts that already include the insurance item will continue to charge insurance as per the pre 4.39.1 functionality

Note:  This functionality is only applicable to "Self-Drive" hire items and will not be applied to any "Operated" items on a hire contract.

If a user tries to disable the "Exclude Hire Suspensions?" flag on an insurance item that is linked to invoiced contracts with a status of "Open" or "Offhired/Pending Final Invoice', they will receive the following error message and must wait until those contracts have been fully invoiced and closed before disabling the feature:

There is no such restriction when disabling the system level setting which then clears the "Exclude Hire Suspensions?" flag from all insurance items which have it enabled: