The subscription economy is the offshoot of the paradigm shift in business to put consumers in the nucleus of everything, including revenue generation. In fact, Zuora in its Subscription Impact Report: COVID-19 Edition, has stated that the subscription economy stood firmly against the testing times of market volatility.
This in fact has been true for the B2B software industry as well that more B2C and B2B2C businesses are increasingly adopting the subscription-based model. So how do these businesses keep track of the revenue forecasts? Well, they use Revenue Schedules.
Revenue Schedules in Salesforce Sales Cloud
If your business offers customers the option to pay the whole sum in installment or uses a subscription-based model, Salesforce provides ‘Product Schedules’ functionality to determine and track the payment and delivery cycles for products that are paid or delivered over time. In this blog post, we will talk specifically about Revenue Schedule; it defines the dates, revenue amounts, and the number of installments for payments, recognizing revenue, or other use.
However, the standard functionality is very basic and some of its key issues include:
- In case there are multiple products under an opportunity, sales reps need to go to every product to view their respective revenue schedule
- Limitations with swapping of opportunity revenue schedules
- The price can’t be updated for existing products
Custom Revenue Schedule Component
To improve the standard Revenue Schedule functionality and to overpower its challenges, our Salesforce experts developed a Custom Revenue Schedules component.
The new component offers a customized, single-page view of revenue schedules for all products under an opportunity. This helped overpower the biggest challenge of clicking every product under an opportunity for viewing their revenue schedules.
Apart from that, another USP of this customized component is the ability to swap revenue schedule details of products under opportunities (if required). Sales reps can also swap the existing product with the new product from the list of products.
This was achieved by adding another tab ‘Edit Revenue Schedules’ to the section. So if a user will click on the ‘Edit Revenue Schedules’ tab, they will get a consolidated view of all the products that are associated with that opportunity in a single grid. And in order to alter the details, they can just double click on the product, enter new details and save them. It is as simple as that.
With custom Revenue Schedule, users can:
1. Swap the products while preserving all the schedules.
2. Update the Revenue Start date, which will then recalculate all the revenue schedules.
3. Update the schedule price that will reflect on the sales price.
4. Update sales price, which will again recalculate all the schedules based on the terms and conditions.
5. Keep track of increase or decrease in the sales price or schedules as the new prices will be recalculated and displayed under sales price with a positive/negative sign.
6. Generate quarterly and total revenue automatically for all the products in a single view.
Note: Sales reps can only perform one action on a product at a time i.e can either update sales price or schedule price or Revenue Start date.
For businesses rolling in revenue on a subscription model for their products or services, this customized component can be of great use. Especially, if you require all your sales reps to have a holistic view of the revenue that is being generated through installments.
Want to know more about this component? Contact us.