Understanding Contracts Security

This chapter provides an overview of Contracts security and discusses how to:

Set up row-level security.
Set up contract status security.
Set up milestone security.
Use roles and permission lists.

Understanding Contracts Security

If you’ve ever been concerned about data integrity, confidentiality, or operator productivity, you understand the value of a well-designed security system. PeopleSoft applications use the capabilities and flexibility of multilevel security to provide an efficient, effective solution to security issues.

Note. The content of this chapter is only part of what you need to know to secure your system. Other relevant information, because it is common to many applications, is located in the PeopleSoft Enterprise Application Fundamentals PeopleBook.

Setting Up Row-Level Security

To establish security within Contracts, you must decide which level of security to establish throughout your system, which key fields to secure, and whether security is handled through user IDs or roles. You can implement security to restrict individual users or roles to specific rows of data that are controlled by such key fields as setIDs or business units. You can also limit users to access only a specific subset of rows.

Instructions for establishing row-level security can be found in the PeopleSoft Enterprise Application Fundamentals PeopleBook.

Setting Up Contract Status Security

When a contract is set to an active processing status, the amounts tied to that contract are potentially available for billing and revenue recognition. Consequently, you may want to limit the list of users that can change a contract's status.

First, enable status security. The default setting for contract status security is Off. You enable security separately for each Contracts business unit you define on the Contracts Definition - BU Definition page.

Next, assign contract status authorizations. You assign contract status authorizations to individual user IDs on the User Preferences - Contracts page. The contract status levels that are available to assign are those you defined on the Contract Status page.

Setting Up Milestone Security

The completion of a milestone can trigger billing or revenue recognition. Consequently, you may want to limit the list of users who have the ability to manage a milestone. In addition, you may wish to limit users who manage milestones to specific types or classifications of milestones. You enforce all milestone security through milestone classifications.

You define milestone classifications on the Milestone Classification page. Milestone classifications use PeopleSoft permission list security. When you define a milestone classification, you associate it with one or more permission lists that you created during your PeopleSoft system setup. When you use the milestone on a contract, only users who belong to one of the permission lists you specified for the milestone’s classification can manage the milestone.

Using Roles and Permission Lists

The user profile that you create for each individual who accesses your application determines the Web pages that the user can access. You create user profiles in Maintain Security, using the User Profile component. You assign roles to each user profile, and you link roles to permission lists. Each permission list identifies the pages that individuals assigned to a role can access. To modify the access for specific Web pages for each role, you modify the permission list for the user’s role.

Note. If you modify a permission list, you change the access for all users who are assigned to roles to which the permission list is linked.

You also use the user profile to define the data that a user has access to.

Contracts includes sample definitions for the following roles:

Contract Administrator.
Billing Manager.
Billing Coordinator.
Financial Analyst.
Chief Financial Officer.
Cost Accountant.
Customer Service Representative.
Legal Administrator.
Project Manager.
Project Team Member.
Sales Manager.

Sample permission lists are associated to these roles. The following table describes the permission lists and their associated permissions.

Permission List	Associated Permission
Customer Contracts	Access to all pages to create and change a contract.
Contracts Accounting Distribution	Access to establish fixed-amount or rate-based accounting distributions.
Contracts Amount Allocation	Access to perform pricing allocation for the original contract and amendments.
Contracts Process Milestones	Access to update milestone status based on milestone conditions.
Contracts Renewals	Access to renewal functionality.
Contracts Prepaids	Access to prepaid functionality.
Contract Sales Order	Access to Create Sales Order page.
Contracts Notes	Access to add notes.
Contracts Milestone Reports	Access to milestone reports.
Contracts Financial Reports	Access to prepaids, limits, billing, revenue, and revenue forecasting reports.
Contracts Revenue	Access to define revenue plans, revenue forecasts, and run processes.
Contracts Reverse Revenue	Access to reverse contract accounting, redistribute revenue, and use billing and revenue reconciliation.
Contracts Review Revenue	Access to Revenue Management pages.
Contracts Billing	Access to define billing plans and run processes.
Contracts Reverse Billing	Access to reverse contract billing and use billing and revenue reconciliation.
Contracts Review Billing	Access to Billing Management pages.
Contracts General Information	Access to view Contracts pages.
Contracts Project Information	Access to view Related Projects pages and project or activity pages.
Contracts Milestone Info	Access to update milestone condition status levels and view milestones.
Contract Limits	Access to limits functionality.
Contracts ESA Portal Pagelets	Access to Contracts portal pagelets.
Define CA Business Units	Access to set up Contracts business units.