On the Commodities tab, you can add Commodity codes. These Commodity codes are only energy related commodities and are here to support the invoicing of energy costs to your customer. It is possible to invoice these without commodities attached to the contract, but the use of this tab will simplify data entry requirements.
Energy consumption can be invoiced to your customer based on attributes like Submetered (yes or no) or by using an Invoice Percentage of the utility bill for meter 123. It is obvious that whatever choice you make, the choice is made for each equipment individually. That then means that if you are leasing 20 spaces to a customer on this contract, that you will have to create 20 individual records for electricity, and if you want to invoice water as well, 20 more records for water simply because the mentioned attributes are different for each equipment and commodity. Invoice Percentage for example will almost certainly depend on the size of the space and the water bill and electricity bill will have a different meter, hence 40 charge definition records will be required.
If you have a contract on which these 20 spaces are listed as Contract Items, you add a commodity on this tab, and there is a Charge Definition record for that commodity, the system will automatically create 20 records for that commodity for any of the 20 spaces attached. When creating these Charge Definition records for that commodity, it will also pull in the energy preferences of those 20 spaces for that commodity if these already exist to ease data entry. The process on the Charge Definition tab will be discussed in more detail.
Deleting a commodity from the contract does the same thing but now deletes Charge Definition records for that commodity. Again, rather than one by one, this is done automatically for all equipment attached to the contract.
Charge Definitions for energy cannot be associated to Contract Items that are a project or a work order.