Understanding the Generate Process

Sometimes you need to enable spending before a proposal is formally approved. When you initiate the Pre-Spending process from the Maintain Proposal page, the system creates the selected projects (in a pending status) and the associated activities in PeopleSoft Project Costing. It does not create a contract or bring forward the budget at this time. The process does store the contract ID and project ID with the proposal to reserve them until you are ready to initiate the Generate process.

When you run the Generate process, the system creates the contract, brings forward the budgets, and includes projects and activities that you added since you ran the Pre-Spending process. After you run the Generate process in PeopleSoft Proposal Management for a proposal, you cannot run it again.

When the proposal status changes to Committed, you can run the Generate process to create the contract and project structures. After you run the Generate process, the system automatically updates the Generate status of the proposal to Generated on the Maintain Proposal page in PeopleSoft Proposal Management and creates the following based on information from the proposal and on the default values for the contracts business unit:

• Contract general information.

• Contract lines.

• PeopleSoft Billing plans.

• Revenue recognition plans.

• Projects and activities.

• Resource lines (asset, material, labor, and other).

• Rate sets.

After the system creates the contract and the contract lines, you cannot run the Contract Generation process again for the proposal. The system stores the contract and project IDs that you created in PeopleSoft Contracts and PeopleSoft Project Costing with the proposal in the appropriate tables.

Defining a contract header is the first step in setting up a new contract. The Generate process in PeopleSoft Proposal Management fills in the appropriate fields based on the defaults that you set up for the contracts business unit and on information contained in the proposal.

Contract fields are available for editing until you activate the contract. Then all fields, except for the Contract Status field, become display-only. Any changes to the Contract Entry components must be made through amendment processing.

Before activating a contract, look at the fields on the page to verify that it is the correct contract. Change the contract status to Active. A processing status of Active indicates that all data for the contract is entered into the system, and that the contract has passed system data validation. A contract must have a status of Active for any contract element to be available for processing. Contracts with an Active status have these attributes:

• Data fields are available for entry only through amendment processing.

• Downstream processing is enabled for the contract.

• The system has confirmed entry of the required fields and has validated contract data.

• The contract is included in prompt pages.

• Contract amendment control is active for the contract.

A contract line corresponds to an individual product or service. The Generate process in PeopleSoft Proposal Management fills in the appropriate fields based on the defaults that you set up for the contracts business unit and on information contained in the proposal.

A contract line corresponds to an individual product or service. For PeopleSoft Proposal Management contracts, a product is a service that you define on the Product Definition page. The system uses the information from the Contract General page and the product to create a set of default values for the contract line. You can override much of this default information at the line level and add additional details. For service-related contract lines, you can associate the contract line with additional projects and rates.

Billing plans store information about when billing occurs, how bills should appear, and what notes should relate to the bill. Data from PeopleSoft Contracts drives the creation of bill lines for fixed-price contract lines. For rate-based contract lines, data from both PeopleSoft Contracts and PeopleSoft Project Costing drives the creation of bill lines. In both cases, PeopleSoft Contracts creates the bill lines for the Billing Interface tables (PS_INTFC_BI, PS_INTFC_BI2, PS_INTFC_NOTE, PS_INTFC_BI_AEDS, and PS_INTFC_BI_HDR).

The Generate process in PeopleSoft Proposal Management fills in the appropriate fields on the Billing Plan General page in PeopleSoft Contracts based on the default values that you set up for the PeopleSoft Proposal Management business unit and associated bill and bill detail templates on the products assigned to activities.

When you change the contract status to Active, the system automatically changes the status of the billing plan to Ready. At this point, you can initiate the Contracts Billing Engine process to select the billing plan for processing. To transfer bill lines to PeopleSoft Billing, you must run the Contracts/Billing Interface process (CA_BI_INTFC).

Revenue recognition plans lists events that define when revenue is recognized for each contract line that is linked to that revenue recognition plan. You associate events with either percentages or amounts. The percentage or amount reflects how much of the contract line's negotiated amount is recognized upon a certain date, milestone, or user-initiated action.

The Generate process in PeopleSoft Proposal Management fills in the appropriate fields on the Rev Rec Plan (revenue recognition plan) page in PeopleSoft Contracts based on the defaults that you set up for the PeopleSoft Contracts business unit and on information contained in the proposal. When you change the contract status to Active, the system automatically changes the status of the revenue recognition plan to Ready.

Data from PeopleSoft Contracts drives the creation of accounting entries for fixed-amount contract lines. For rate-based contract lines, data from PeopleSoft Contracts and PeopleSoft Project Costing drives the creation of accounting entries. In both cases, PeopleSoft Contracts creates accounting entries to send to PeopleSoft General Ledger and creates the bill lines that the system sends to PeopleSoft Billing.

PeopleSoft Contracts generates the revenue entries, crediting revenue and debiting contract asset, and then sends these entries to PeopleSoft General Ledger. PeopleSoft Billing generates the offsetting entries, crediting contract asset and debiting PeopleSoft Receivables.

The Generate process creates projects and activities in PeopleSoft Project Costing based on information that is contained in the proposal. If the system cannot create the required structures, then the Generate process cannot be completed.

To verify that the project and activities exist, navigate to the Related Projects page from the Details tab on the Lines page in PeopleSoft Contracts. You can also navigate to the Project General page through the PeopleSoft Project Costing navigational structure.

After you create projects and activities through the Generate process, you can maintain project information, perform project analysis, track procurement costs, create budgets, track expenses, gather resource costs, price resources, process allocations, and generate operational reports.

You charge customers a rate for the services that you provide plus the related costs. By establishing rate sets and rate plans in PeopleSoft Project Costing, you can efficiently manage pricing across multiple project activities using a limited number of rate plans. Rate sets and rate plans in PeopleSoft Project Costing are dynamic and subject to change in rate structure over time.

When you sell a service to a customer, you establish rates for that service. The service can be provided at your standard billing rates, which may be subject to change over time, or you might provide services at rates that are fixed for the duration of the contract obligation.

For details about using the rate plan and defining rate sets for rate-based contract lines, refer to the PeopleSoft Contracts documentation.

When you run the Generate process, the system creates in PeopleSoft Program Management's ARL the project team and activity resource team information along with bill and cost rates. Resource lines with markup or markdown appear in the ARL as custom rate type lines.

The Generate process then creates revenue and cost budget plans. In doing this, the Generate process calls the Get Plan Application Engine process (PGM_SPREAD) to spread the budget detail based on the defined calendar and any markup or markdown amounts appear as single rows per resource line on the Budget Detail page. For example, if there two bill rows and a 10 percent markup, the system creates one line for each resource row as follows:

For more information on the Get Plan process, refer to PeopleSoft Project Costing's budgeting process.