Automatically "Unlock" Locked Contracts

A frequent issue some clients encounter is having to unlock contracts for students who just can’t seem to remember their university ID. 🤔 We’ve often been asked if there is a way to automate this process.

Now there is! By using a scheduled Custom Dataset Process (available in Mercury 2021.3 and later), you can now automatically “unlock” (change status to pending) locked contracts at regular intervals.

Please note that you cannot send correspondence as part of a Custom Dataset Process so you will not be able to notify students at the time their contract is unlocked. However, you could have a Correspondence-Create operation scheduled to run a few minutes prior to this Custom Dataset Process to notify students with locked contracts that their contract will be unlocked in X minutes (I recommend building in some buffer time).

Here’s the SQL for configuring this Custom Dataset Process operation.

UPDATE PPLE_GeneratedContract
SET Status = '1'
WHERE Status = '6'

Note: The above SQL statement will unlock all locked contracts; if there are certain scenarios in which you would not want a contract to be unlocked, you will need to add additional conditions to the where clause.

Contract Statuses are included below for reference:

1 = Pending
2 = Abandoned
3 = Accepted
4 = Complete
5 = Voided
6 = Locked

Disclaimer: Custom Dataset Processes are a powerful tool that should only be configured/implemented by users who have a keen understanding of their tables and data. Even for advanced users, we recommend testing all CDP operations in your test/play environment.

There is even more Mercury magic ✨ that can be unlocked with Custom Dataset Processes. What else do you want to do?