Understanding Product Integration

PeopleSoft Contracts for Government Contracting is designed to fully integrate with PeopleSoft Project Costing, Billing, General Ledger, and Order Management. To fully utilize the features and functionality for government contracts, you are required to install PeopleSoft Project Costing and PeopleSoft Billing, and to complete the setup required for PeopleSoft Contracts.

You must set up the PeopleSoft Contracts system to enable you to create and effectively manage government contracts, as the government contracts processes and functionality relies on the core structure set up in PeopleSoft Contracts.

The following table identifies the core Contacts features used by contracts that are assigned a contract classification of Government:

PeopleSoft Contracts Feature	Usage
Business Units	Whether you are creating government or non-government contracts, you must define a business unit. Business units represent a high level organization of your business. PeopleSoft Contracts enables you to define progress payment rates, contract entry defaults, and cost-plus contract line fee definitions at the business unit level for contracts assigned the contract classification of Government.
Accounting Distributions	To create accounting entries for amount-based contract lines, you must set up accounting distributions and associate them to the contract lines and progress payment terms.
Accounting Rules	To create accounting entries for your rate-based contract lines and rate-based contract lines with a fee type (cost-plus), you must define accounting rules for all analysis types that are included in the analysis groups of PSWKS, PSCST, and PSREV. In addition PSRV2 must be defined if your contracts are setup to separate billing and revenue.
Contract Entry	All of the government contracts features require that you create a contract. When you create a contract, you must associate the contract with a contract classification of Government to activate all of the fields related to government contracting. Many of the government contract specific fields and features are hidden unless the contract is associated with a government contract classification.
Contract Lines	Amount and rate-based contract lines represent the products that you deliver to the customer. Every contract must have at least one contract line associated with it. Use the contract lines as the basis for the following actions for your contract: Generating bills. Recognizing revenue. Associating projects and activities. Associating rate sets and rate plans. Associating withholding and limit amounts. Associating progress payment terms. Associating cost-plus billing and revenue fees.
Milestones	Milestones represent an event in the life of the contract that is usually associated with billing or revenue recognition activities. You can use PeopleSoft Contracts milestones to manage billing or revenue for your contract lines, or you can use them to schedule award or incentive fee events. To use milestones to control billing and revenue processing, you must define the milestones in your PeopleSoft Contracts system, assign them to the government contract, assign them to the billing and revenue plans as events, manage when the conditions for the milestone have been met, and update the milestone statuses to Complete.
Billing Plans	Billing plans control the timing of billing for your contractual obligations. You must associate a billing plan to your contract lines to generate invoices for contract lines, billing fees associated with the contract lines, and progress payments.
Revenue Plans	Revenue plans control the timing of revenue recognition for your contractual obligations. You must associate a revenue plan to your contract lines to recognize revenue for contract lines and revenue fees associated with the contract lines.
Bill Processing	Bill processing for your government contract lines is controlled by PeopleSoft Contracts. Using billing plans, PeopleSoft Contracts retrieves bill data from PeopleSoft Project Costing and PeopleSoft Contracts tables, and submits the data for processing through to PeopleSoft Billing to generate invoices.
Revenue Processing	Revenue processing for your government contracts is controlled by PeopleSoft Contracts, with the exception of when PeopleSoft Billing manages revenue for an amount-based contract line. Using revenue plans, PeopleSoft Contracts passes the revenue accounting entries to PeopleSoft General Ledger for processing.
Prepaids	PeopleSoft Contracts enables you to define and manage prepaid amounts for rate-based contract lines that are not assigned to a fee type, and are not withholding-applicable. PeopleSoft Contracts enables you to define the criteria for using the prepaid amount over the life of the contract.
Amendment Processing	After a contract has been activated, most changes or adjustments must be made using amendment processing. Amendment processing enables you to maintain a historical record of the various changes that may occur during the contract's life cycle. Withholding terms, progress payment rates or terms, limit changes, and cost-plus fee or limit changes are only a few of the features that are controlled by amendment processing.
Revenue Forecasting	Use the revenue forecasting features of PeopleSoft Contracts to estimate your revenue for future periods on your amount and rate-based contract lines.
Online Contract Summary Views and Inquiries	View summarized data for your government contract, billing, or revenue entries using the Contract Summary, Billing, and Revenue Management pages.
Reporting	You can run delivered reports to view, manage, and track overall contract processing related to billing, revenue, milestones, and limits. Note: Additional reporting that is specific to government contracting is discussed in the reporting topic. See PeopleSoft Contracts for Government Contracting Reports: A to Z.

See Understanding PeopleSoft Contracts Structure for Government Contracting.