Understanding PeopleSoft Contracts Core Structure

Setting up your PeopleSoft Contracts core structure includes setting up any control tables, business units, accounting structure, products, installation defaults, and so on that support the processing and management of your contracts, billing, and revenue generation.

This section identifies the required setup for general processing of a government contract. Additional required setup for a specific government contracts sub-features is covered in the remaining government contracts sections of this documentation.

Setup Task	Purpose	Reference
Define installation level setting for PeopleSoft Contracts.	To set up your processing settings at the overall system level, you must define your options on the Installation Options-Contracts page. You can define processing settings for the accounting date that is used for revenue recognition, limit processing, and forecasting. For rate-based contract lines that are assigned to the cost-plus fee type, you can indicate if you want to process limits in a summarized form. This option controls if the summary limits and public voucher number (PVN) fields, links, and pages are available for use.	See Application Fundamentals: Installation Options - Contracts Page.
Define PeopleSoft Contracts business units.	PeopleSoft Contracts business units are identification codes that represent a high-level organization of business information. PeopleSoft Contracts, accounting rules, fees, rates and progress payment settings are all defined by the contracts business unit.	See Understanding Contracts Business Units.
Define accounting distributions.	Accounting distributions enable the system to create accounting entries for amount-based contract lines. Valid contract asset, and contract liability (optional) account distribution codes must be assigned to contract lines before the contract can be activated, bills can be generated, and revenue can be processed for amount-based contract lines, prepaids, and progress payment amounts.	See PeopleSoft Contracts: Fixed-Amount Contract Lines.
Define accounting rules.	Accounting rules enable the system to create accounting entries for rate-based contract lines and rate-based contract lines that are assigned to fee types (cost-plus). Valid contract asset and revenue accounting distributions must be defined, and assigned to the accounting rules before bills can be generated and revenue can be processed for rate-based contract lines and rate-based contract lines that are associated with fee types (cost-plus). Note: If you have contracts that separate billing and revenue, then the system uses the PSRV2 analysis type when processing revenue accounting entries for rate-based contract lines. Therefore, in addition to defining accounting rules used for bill processing, you must also define a separate accounting rule for revenue (REV) to generate revenue accounting entries.	See PeopleSoft Contracts: Rate-based Contract Lines. See Cost-Plus Contract Line Accounting Distribution.
Define contract statuses.	Contract statuses provide a visual indicator of where the contract is within the contract life cycle and designates when a contract is available for look-up and processing. Contract statuses are user-defined and are associated with a processing status that controls the contract's eligibility for processing.	See PeopleSoft Contracts: Defining Contract Statuses.
Define contract types.	Contract types enable you to define categories for your contracts for reporting purposes. If you are using contract milestones, you can also use contract types to limit the types of contracts in which you can use a specific milestone.	See PeopleSoft Contracts: Defining Contract Types.
Define billing and revenue plan templates (optional).	Billing and revenue plan templates enable you to automate billing and revenue plan setup. Billing plans are required and are used to process bills for contract line items, fees and progress payments requests. Revenue plans are required to process revenue accounting entries for contract line items and fees. If you do not define billing or revenue plan templates, then you must manually set up billing and revenue plans for your contract lines and progress payments requests before you can process bills and recognize revenue.	See PeopleSoft Contracts: Defining Revenue and Billing Plan Templates.
Define billing plan detail templates (optional).	Billing plan detail templates enable you to automatically override the billing defaults that are defined for a contracts billing business unit and contract header.	See PeopleSoft Contracts: Defining Billing Plan Detail Templates.
Define billing summarization templates (optional).	Summarization templates enable you to define criteria that the system can use to summarize billing plan lines.	See PeopleSoft Contracts: Defining Billing Summarization Templates.
Define legal entities.	Legal entities are used in PeopleSoft Contracts to track the legal entity within your company who signs a particular contract.	See PeopleSoft Contracts: Defining Legal Entities.
Define milestones (optional).	Milestones can control the timing of billing and revenue recognition processing for amount-based contract lines, incentive and award fees. Setting up milestones can include defining milestone classifications, milestone templates, and custom SQL statements to use for milestone conditions.	See PeopleSoft Contracts: Defining Milestones.
Define amendment types.	Any changes to an active contract's products, terms, or conditions is controlled by amendment processing. Amendment types enable you to define classifications of modifications that can be made to an active contract.	See PeopleSoft Contracts: Understanding Amendments. See PeopleSoft Contracts: Amendment Type Page.
Define amendment reasons.	Amendment reasons enable you to define quick explanations as to why an amendment is performed.	See PeopleSoft Contracts: Amendment Reason Page.
Define email notification workflow and support teams (optional).	Support teams represent key personnel in your organization that are involved in the contract life cycle. You can set up email notification and workflow so that specific support team members are notified when the status of a particular contract changes.	See PeopleSoft Contracts: Defining Email Notifications.
Define products.	You must define the products that represent the good and services that you deliver in your contracts, including the specification of PeopleSoft Contracts attributes. Once defined, you add these products to your contract lines. Contract lines are the basis for your billing and revenue recognition activities. Only amount and rate-based products can be associated with government contracts. Renewable products are not eligible for government contracts.	See Understanding Products.
Define rate sets and rate plans.	Rate sets enable you to define markups and rates per hour (or another unit of measure) to create cost, billing and revenue on your rate-based contract lines. Rate plans enable you to bundle multiple rate sets together to define a sequence of costing and rate applications that enable the system to calculate both your direct and indirect costs.	See PeopleSoft Contracts: Rate Setup. See Pricing Rate-Based Contract Lines.