In this topic, you will learn how to better understand milestones.
Steps:
Every milestone has a milestone condition associated with it. When you define a milestone, you indicate one or more conditions that need to be true for the milestone to be considered complete. When you link a milestone to a contract, you indicate whether the milestone is dependent on one or all of the conditions.
Step 1When the Milestone condition is assigned to a milestone, you can associate the milestone with another milestone that has already been defined in PeopleSoft Contracts or PeopleSoft Projects. This enables you to define complex relationships along milestones. For example, a milestone Work Started with a milestone condition of Milestone is defined in PeopleSoft Projects. The milestone condition is met when the Project activity status is Open. The milestone application engine process will update the milestone condition status to Complete as well as the milestone status to Work Started.
Step 2When the Date condition is assigned to a milestone, you indicate the date the milestone condition will be met. When the milestone application engine process runs and the system date is greater than or equal to the milestone condition date, the milestone condition is automatically updated to Complete. For example, for a milestone Contract Signed with a milestone condition of Date, you indicate the date to be 1/1/2004. When the system date equals 1/1/2004 or greater, the milestone application engine process will update the milestone condition status to Complete as well as the milestone Contract Signed.
Step 3When the User Initiated condition is assigned to a milestone, you manually change the condition status from Ready to Complete to specify that the milestone condition has been met. The next time the application engine process is run, it will update the milestone status to Complete.
Step 4When the SQL condition is assigned to a milestone, you can associate an SQL statement with a milestone. SQL conditions enable you to create custom milestone conditions specific to your business.
Step 5A milestone status indicates whether the milestone is reached. This status can be either user-initiated or controlled by PeopleSoft Contracts. The status of the milestone must be Complete to indicate that the milestone has been achieved.
Step 6Milestones with status of Pending are ignored by the Milestone application engine process. You can add or delete milestone conditions for milestones with a status of Pending.
Step 7Milestones are processed by the Milestone application engine process. You cannot change a milestone and its conditions if the milestone status is Ready. To do so, you need to change the milestone status to Pending.
Step 8The milestone application engine process updates the milestone status to Complete when the milestone conditions are met. After the milestone status has been changed to Complete, no further adds, changes, or deletions are allowed. The status of the milestone cannot be changed.
Step 9You can cancel your milestone by manually changing the status from Pending or Ready to Cancelled. After you change the status to Cancelled, you cannot make any changes to the milestone or the status.
Step 10The milestone status is related to other statuses in PeopleSoft Contracts, such as the status of revenue recognition plan events and billing plan events. Therefore, you can reference milestones to trigger such actions as billing and revenue recognition when the milestone status is set to Complete. However, you cannot perform these activities if the milestone status is Pending.
Step 11In addition to the milestone status, the milestone condition status determines whether a milestone is available for processing.
PeopleSoft Contracts supports two milestone condition statuses, Ready and Complete. All new milestone conditions have a default condition status of Ready. When a milestone condition is met, the condition status is updated to Complete. You cannot modify a milestone condition that has a condition status of Complete.
Step 12In PeopleSoft Contracts, you define generic milestones with generic conditions. Each generic milestone and the associated conditions can be used as a template for creating contract-specific milestones. After the contract-specific milestones are created, you can create milestone based billing plan events and revenue recognition plan events.
Step 13Congratulations, you have successfully gained an understanding of how to use milestones to control billing or revenue recognition in PeopleSoft Contracts. When you define a milestone, you indicate the conditions that need to be true for the milestone to be considered complete. You can create generic milestones and generic milestone conditions that you can use to create contract-specific milestones and milestone conditions.