Milestone Conditions

A milestone is a significant event in the life of a contract. Achieving a milestone can result in sending a bill or recognizing revenue. The first step in setting up a milestone is defining the events that must be achieved to complete the milestone. In PeopleSoft Contracts, these events consist of milestone conditions. The system supports four types of milestone conditions that you can combine in any way to support simple to complex milestone processing rules:

Term	Definition
Milestone	Satisfied by the completion of another milestone. You associate this condition type with another milestone that you have defined in either PeopleSoft Contracts or PeopleSoft Project Costing.
Date	Triggered when the system date reaches the date that you specified for this condition type.
User Initiated	Satisfied by a user manually updating the condition status from Ready to Completed. For example, you could use a user-initiated milestone condition for a service contract when billing cannot occur until a signed work order was received from the customer. The condition is an event that takes place outside of the system.
SQL (Structured Query Language)	Associate the milestone with a SQL statement (WHERE clause) that you wrote. SQL milestones enable you to create custom milestones specific to a business.

Important:

SQL milestone conditions are an advanced option. Only persons with extensive knowledge of SQL should create SQL milestone conditions. It is advised that these conditions be reviewed by the manager of the Information Systems department.

You can create milestones consisting of one or more conditions, and you can have any number of the same condition type on a single milestone. You designate that the milestone is met when either one or all of the conditions are achieved. By setting a milestone to be met when any one of its conditions is achieved, you can support business cases in which revenue or billing must be triggered by the earlier of two or more unrelated events.

The terms and conditions of a contract can be such that you may have to satisfy several conditions before billing a customer or booking revenue for a contract line. By using milestones, you can capture all of these conditions within the PeopleSoft Contracts system and set up events so that when these conditions are met, the bills are sent out and the revenue is recognized.

When setting up the PeopleSoft Contracts system, you define generic milestone templates. Each generic milestone template can contain a list of conditions. Use these milestone templates when creating contract-specific milestones, and define the criteria for each condition as it relates to the contract. After you create contract milestones, you can reference them on milestone-based billing and revenue plans. You can also reference the contract milestones on the events on those plans.

Generic milestone templates also contain a milestone classification. As the completion of a milestone can result in generating a bill or booking revenue, enforcing milestone security is important. The system enforces milestone security through the milestone's classification; an employee must be given access to a milestone classification to be able to perform edits on milestones of that classification.

In PeopleSoft Project Costing, you set up milestones by creating milestone activities. You associate the PeopleSoft Project Costing milestones with revenue recognition and billing events, as well as with PeopleSoft Contracts milestone conditions, just as you would contract milestones. PeopleSoft Project Costing milestones have a different structure and do not use conditions.