Understanding Contracts Implementation Issues

This chapter provides an overview of contract implementation and discusses how to:

Create and administer contracts.
Map enterprise data flow.
Recognize your business structure.
Define a File Transfer Protocol (FTP) server for document attachments.

Understanding Contract Implementation

To implement Contracts, you first need to design the system's business structure and put that structure in place. You must determine the best way to map your new system to your organization’s business structures, practices, and procedures.

Creating and Administering Contracts

The high-level steps involved in creating and administering a contract are:

Capture the financial terms and conditions of a contract in Contracts.

Common contract information is stored at the contract header level.
Select specific products and services using product IDs.

Select the product IDs to add to contract lines and manage through the financial terms and conditions of the contract.
Verify accounting distributions for the contract lines.

Each contract line contains its own set of accounting distributions. You can split revenue for a contract line across multiple organizations.
Price the contract.

You allocate the gross fixed amount across contract lines. You allocate a contract header discount or surcharge to specific contract lines. You can also define contract line discounts or surcharges to those lines as well.
Verify accounting distributions for any discounts or surcharges that you added to the contract.

Each discount or surcharge that you add contains a separate set of accounting distributions.
Associate each contract line with a billing plan that you set up in Contracts.

Define, administer, and maintain billing schedules and billing rules for the products and services you provide under a contract.

You can predefine templates and associate them with a product ID to have the system automatically create billing plans and associate them to contract lines.
Associate each contract line with a revenue plan in Contracts.

For amount-based contract lines, either Contracts or Billing can manage revenue. For rate-based contract lines, revenue must be managed by Contracts. When Contracts manages revenue, you associate each contract line with a revenue plan that you set up in Contracts. Contracts revenue plans enable you to define, administer, and maintain revenue schedules for the products and services that you manage under a contract. Selecting Contracts to manage your revenue provides you with a high degree of control over the revenue recognition process.

For recurring contract lines, Billing must manage the revenue. Therefore, no revenue plan is required.

You can predefine templates and associate them with a product ID to have the system automatically create revenue plans and associate them to contract lines.
Associate Project Costing project IDs/activity IDs and pricing rates to contract lines.

For a contract line that has a rate-based price type, you associate that line with a project ID/activity ID from Project Costing. Rate-based products can be linked to multiple projects and activities; fixed-amount products can be linked to a single project and activity. For rate-based products, you can link the product to an existing standard rate set, standard rate plan, contract rate set, or contract rate plan on the Related Projects page in Project Costing. When work begins on a project, time and expense information is collected in Project Costing. Contracts uses the rate, time, and expense information from Project Costing, matches this up with the revenue plan and billing plan you created in Contracts, sends the information to Billing to invoice the customer, and sends the information to General Ledger to book the revenue. For amount and recurring product IDs linked to a project and activity, billing activity processed from Contracts is passed to Project Costing for analysis.
Manage milestones.
Manage revenue recognition for each revenue plan.
Manage billing for each billing plan.
Manage changes to the contract through amendment processing.

Amendment processing enables you to make changes to an active contract while keeping a historical record of the original contract and any prior amendments to that contract.

Mapping Enterprise Data Flow

You need to determine the flow of data into and out of Contracts. Mapping which applications integrate with Contracts and how to carry out that integration helps you with setup decisions.

Here are some questions to help with this mapping:

What applications integrate with Contracts?
Are these applications currently implemented?

If not, when are they scheduled for implementation?
What do you want to track in your Contracts system?

Recognizing Your Business Structure

Implementing Contracts requires an iterative method of examining your business processes and investigating the software. When designing your system, take into account your policies, procedures, and existing structures. Assess how they can be incorporated in Contracts. Ask questions such as the following:

How do you control contract management?

How does this relate to your legal and financial organizational structure?

Is it centralized or decentralized?
To what extent do you want to take advantage of the hierarchical structure afforded by using a combination of master contracts, standard contracts, and parent contracts?
How do you want to control the security of your contracts, contract milestones, and contract status levels?
Who is involved in the contracts process at your company?
What level of automation versus manual control do you want to have for billing and revenue plans?
How do you structure your projects and project rates?

Are rates tied to a contract line?

Defining an FTP Server for Document Attachments

Contracts uses an FTP server to store document attachments. You must establish an FTP server with adequate disk storage to store your documents. The CA_ATTACHMENTS URL is delivered with Contracts, but you must update the data in the URL field so that the path to the appropriate FTP server is specified. To designate the path to the FTP server, use the URL Maintenance page.

The syntax for this URL is ftp://<username>:<password>@<machinename>.

<username>	Name of the user account under which you want all users to connect to the FTP server for adding, updating, viewing, and deleting documents.
<password>	Password associated with the user account under which you want all users to connect to the FTP server.
<machinename>	The name by which the FTP server is identified on your network. You may want to create a directory on the server where your documents are stored. If you create an optional directory, then include this directory name when citing your path. You can also store the attachments in the root directory of the FTP server.

Important! The user name and password specified here are critical. The system uses these to connect all users to the FTP attachment server.