2 - Delivery and Milestone Management
Overview
This section takes you through how to manage your contract once your proposal has been approved by the community.
Contract Management Process
Smart Contract Administration Dashboard
To assist the use of smart contracts, an administration dashboard is available. It will be accessible to vendors via the credentials provided by the vendor in the legal contract.
Delivery Assurance will complete a visual check to ensure you can login and interact with your smart contract instance.
This will allow you - the vendor, to complete the following actions:
Sign a contract
Sign a contract change
Attach your Milestone Acceptance Forms (MAF)
Withdraw milestone payments on chain
View your project details, milestone details and progress
Documentation on the administration tooling is available here.
Milestone Completion Process
Once you have completed a milestone, ensure you have delivered what was agreed within the legal contract.
You are required to submit a MAF explaining what you did and how you achieved your milestone, in line with the acceptance criteria in your legal contract.
Prepare your milestone evidence using the MAF template, as outlined in the Delivery Assurance Best Practice Policy.
Share a copy of the MAF with Delivery Assurance once it has been reviewed by the TPA, or at the same time, via Slack or another agreed communication channel.
Delivery Assurance will provide feedback, which should be addressed prior to finalization.
Once feedback has been implemented and Delivery Assurance is satisfied, seek formal signature from the TPA.
Upload the final MAF (with TPA signature) as metadata to the milestone through the administration dashboard, prior to or on the milestone delivery date.
Sign the MAF via the dashboard; Delivery Assurance will then complete the final signature.
Download Milestone Acceptance Form
Review & Outcome
Delivery Assurance will review the MAF to ensure it has been completed and uploaded correctly.
All submitted evidence is transparent to the community. If there is something sensitive to share, please contact your Delivery Assurance representative.
If evidence is sufficient, the payment will become available to withdraw as per the milestone payment date.
If evidence is not supplied or is deemed insufficient, Delivery Assurance will work with you to rectify the issue; if unresolved, the milestone may be paused (subject to Intersect senior approval), with rationale provided.
If a milestone is paused, once sufficient evidence is provided and uploaded, payment can be resumed and the milestone will be available to withdraw.
Here is an example of a Good MAF.
You are required to follow this process to ensure consistency across all vendors and projects and also help the community understand the value you have delivered.
Invoice Submission
Many organisations will still require invoices for legal and traditional financial bookkeeping, including the CDH.
Vendors must submit invoices for every milestone, via the smart contract dashboard.
Invoices must be submitted in accordance with the details provided in the appendix (link to be updated), as invoices are processed automatically. Failure to submit correctly may result in the invoice being automatically rejected.
The invoice should be submitted within 5 working days of the milestone completion date to avoid payment date delays.
If you have not met the quality and upload criteria of the milestone and MAF metadata, and the invoice submission - your payment will be paused until these have been rectified.
Payment
Each written contract specifies a milestone completion date and a payment date. This payment date is usually 30 days following the milestone completion date. This allows a circa 30 day period to review and approve milestone evidence, much like how traditional contracts have payment terms.
Whilst Intersect does not want to unduly deny or delay funding to vendors it is important that sufficient time is taken to review evidence and if necessary, solicit community feedback prior to the payment date.
As a safeguard towards vendors, the smart contract framework operates as ‘fail-open’, this means that should Intersect or its oversight fail in any way, vendor payments will never be automatically blocked.
Go to Step 3 – Smart Contract Actions & Contract Completion
Move to the final stage of the process to understand how smart contract actions work and what to expect as your project reaches completion.
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