Contract Identification Rules

A customer contract is an agreement between two or more parties that creates enforceable rights and obligations.

A customer contract:

  • May not always result in a single revenue contract in Revenue Management.

  • Represents the obligations, valuation, and the allocation of the valuation of the customer contract for revenue recognition.

  • May consist of multiple revenue contracts.

The Identify Customer Contracts process identifies sales orders for inclusion in revenue contracts in Revenue Management using contract identification rules. Within the contract identification rule, you define the sales order attributes to be used to indicate how the orders are to be differentiated into a single revenue contract.

Revenue Management provides predefined contract identification rules. However, if these rules don't meet your company's needs, you can create a rule specific to your company.

Use contract identification rules to create contracts based on source data imported from multiple source applications. Configure rules to determine which source document types should be processed by the rule and how the data should be grouped into an accounting contract. For example, data can be grouped by customer party, time frame, customer purchase order number, or other common identifiers such as opportunity ID or salesperson.

Revenue Management provides these three predefined contract identification rules. However, if these rules don't meet your company's needs, you can create a rule specific to your company.

Rule

Description

Identify customer contract based on party (and time duration)

This rule identifies all source documents created for a party within a 30-day time frame as a customer contract.

Identify customer contract based on source document

This rule groups all lines of a source document into a single accounting contract.

Identify customer contract based on source document line

This rule identifies each source document line as an individual accounting contract.

Rules are executed in the order of priority.

To ensure that the Identify Customer Contracts process can process all lines correctly, all lines in the unprocessed pool and every source document line are part of a customer contract. These contracts can be either newly identified customer contracts or existing customer contracts.

Note: You can't deactivate the predefined rules.

Extensible Attributes

If you need to create a new contract identification rule because the identifier you're using isn't a named attribute, you can use an extensible attribute.

Note: Be careful when using extensible attributes, particularly if your Revenue Management setup also uses other Oracle data sources. To ensure that your rules are compatible across all of your data sources, both Oracle and non-Oracle sources, use extensible attributes 41 through 60.