Creating Payment Plans

The payment plan in an ESA project may need to account for the possibility of direct payment from ESA to some of the sub-contractors.

If all sub-contractors are directly paid by ESA then your payment plan needs to be built based on your own expenses alone.

To the contrary, if none of the sub-contractors are directly paid by ESA then your payment plan needs to be built on your Integrated proposal.

In the intermediary case where part of the sub-contractors are directly paid by ESA, the current solution is to produce an integrated file containing your own expenses and those from the sub-contractors NOT directly paid by ESA.

The latter case may however be difficult to organise when you have more than one level of sub-contracting in the Industrial Team.

A more rigorous and easier-to-handle process is being put in place in ECOS 5.1, which is to be released soon and will allow you to define who is directly paid by ESA and who is not. A specific report option will allow you to aggregate all payment plans so ESA will be able to visualize its overall cash disbursement profile needs.

Payment milestones are defined per contractual phase. They can be defined as percentages of the contractual phase or as fixed amounts. We recommend to use percentage values because when minor changes are necessary to the contractual phase price change the milestone values will be adjusted automatically.

A graph of Payments vs. Expenses shows you in real time how your payment plan balances your expenses, which allows you to converge rapidly towards a balanced situation.