Hi all! Has anyone done much in the way of integrating contracts, bids, and invoices tied to assets in Shotgun? How have you done it, and is source control involved?
Here's what I have set up. I'm currently managing a team of 25 - 50 outsourced artists through Shotgun across thousands of assets. Consequently, billing and tracking got tricky because I'm constantly issuing new contracts and assigning work and adding them to Shotgun. So, I had the idea of creating Contracts as an entity with its own trackable tasks, with assets and tasks from assets associated with that Contract.
Each asset is tied to a specific Contract in the system, which is a custom entity I created containing vendor data, contract dollar total, with contract-specific tasks tracking whether it's been signed, executed, invoiced, paid, etc. Also, each asset's individual tasks (concept, model, texture, etc) is also tied to the Contract item by item, so it only tracks tasks that are outsourced and tracks their status and completion. Whereas internal tasks like integration, level of detail models, QA review, etc aren't filtered into that view.
With this setup, I can actually "open" a Contract in Shotgun and see exactly asset by asset, or even task by task, how complete things are and whether they're invoiceable. I actually use the estimates my contractors send me to do an Asset Import into Shotgun, which makes it even easier. And what's more, I've allowed file uploads of the actual contracts, bids, invoices, etc into the Contract entity itself to track those files.
The last bit that I haven't implemented across the board yet, but you can even track the original bid from the Work Order on a task-by-task basis, and have the vendors log time against it to map % over\under to measure efficiency. Haven't had time to roll that out across the whole system yet, but it's in my future plans.
All that being said, I'm basically working in a vacuum and haven't gotten many eyes on it yet, and I'm at the point that I've put enough time into it that I should start researching other peoples' setup and case studies to learn from so I can strengthen my system.
Would love to get input and see how other people do it!
-jon