Frequently Asked Questions¶

Why a separate plugin instead of using Nautobot's built-in custom fields?¶

Custom fields work for "tag a contract number on every device" but break down for any of the analytics this plugin provides. There's no way to express "find all devices whose Tenant has a contract ending within 30 days" with custom fields — they don't carry the FK structure or the ChangeLog history that makes those queries possible.

Why doesn't the burn rate match my finance system?¶

Two likely reasons:

billing_period mismatch. Migration 0007 defaults every existing contract to billing_period='monthly'. If you have annual contracts already in the database, their recurring_cost is being treated as a monthly figure — over-counting by 12x. Edit those contracts after upgrade. See Install.
Currency mixing. The plugin never sums across currencies. If your finance system reports a single "total spend" and yours doesn't, that's because we're showing per-currency rows. The dashboard is intentionally honest about this — see Why no FX conversion?.

Why no FX conversion?¶

Summing $5,000 USD + €4,000 EUR into a single number is wrong in three different ways:

Which exchange rate? Spot? Booked? Internal?
As of when? Today? When the contract was signed? Average over the term?
For which purpose? Cash-flow forecasting? GAAP reporting? Procurement comparison?

Pushing the question up to whoever owns FX in your org (probably finance) is the correct conservative behavior. The plugin's helpers return dict[currency, Decimal] and let the dashboard render each currency on its own row.

Why a generic FK on `ContractAssignment` instead of M2M to Device?¶

A vendor support contract typically covers a fleet — devices, circuits, virtual machines, sometimes a whole tenant. Modeling it as a Device M2M would mean separate models for every assignable target type. The generic FK lets one ContractAssignment row cover any Nautobot model with a UUID PK (which is every Nautobot model).

Why doesn't deleting a Contract delete its CostSnapshot history?¶

Snapshots are point-in-time fleet aggregates, not per-contract rows. They have no FK to Contract on purpose — historical "we used to spend $X with that vendor" data should survive contract deletion. If we linked them, deleting a contract destroys exactly the history operators want to keep.

Why are the Job log lines tagged `[URGENT]` / `[WARNING]` / `[INFO]`?¶

The Check upcoming renewals Job uses the same priority rubric as the Action Required dashboard surface (centralized in priority.action_priority()). Tagging the log line with the tier means an operator scanning JobLogEntry rows can find the URGENT lines as fast as the dashboard's URGENT bucket.

Can I use this plugin without the cost analytics?¶

Yes. The cost analytics are additive — if you don't set recurring_cost, billing_period, or term_months, the cost surface (Cost Summary panel, Renewal Forecast panel, Cost History page) just shows zero / empty. The core Contract / Invoice / Assignment models work fine on their own.

Why are notes auto-wired but I have to opt in to other features?¶

Nautobot's NautobotUIViewSetRouter auto-registers <model>/<pk>/notes/, <model>/<pk>/changelog/, <model>/<pk>/contacts/, and a few others for every viewset it knows about. Other features (custom fields, relationships, statuses, webhooks, GraphQL) require explicit extras_features("...") registration on the model — different mechanism. The auto-wired ones come along for free.

Where do I report bugs / request features?¶

Open an issue on the GitHub repository.