Managing Subscriptions with Salesforce and your Accounting

As companies move to a Service-Delivery and Software-as-a-Service model the focus shifts from building and selling products to managing ongoing or recurring customer relationships, resulting in predictable revenue streams – adding a new challenge for billing them. This article will outline the design concepts, configuration considerations, and setup recommendations to support recurring services business models in Salesforce and its integration with accounting systems like popular QuickBooks, Microsoft Dynamics GP or NAV, Sage, NetSuite and more using DBSync.

Below is a summary of key configuration recommendations to support basic recurring services and serves to tegraform the reader on best practices, configuration options, and guidance on how to setup the Salesforce instance to support recurring services.

Standard opp

• Build a Scheduled Job to copy the opp every billing period and update the Close Date / Billing date and mark it for Generate invoice
• Use DBSync standard template to push this to accounting
• Pros: Simple to implement
• Cons: Do not get Revenue forecasts, good for month to month billing but not for long term contracts where we need to do revenue recognition 

Revenue or Quantity Schedule

• Use standard Revenue or Quantity schedule function to split the revenue of Opportunity Products into multiple Schedules
• A schedule associated with a product in a price book
• Establish a default quantity schedule or a default revenue schedule
• Use DBSync customized solution to push this to accounting
• Pros: Suitable if your customers receive their order on a delivery schedule and also pay for the products using a payment schedule, Revenue forecasts
• Cons: Need Administrative help to establish schedules for revenue or Quantity on Opportunity products. 

Contracts

• Contracts typically incorporate an Approval Process and leverage workflow for renewals
• Use Schedule Job to copy content of Contract to billing period on Order and update the Billing date and mark it for Generate invoice.
• Use DBSync extended solution to push this to accounting
• Pros: By placing contract management within Salesforce.com, you can streamline everything – contract creation, changes, approvals, signatures, archiving and renewals
• Cons: Contracts themselves do not have Line Items or an Amount field, but often have Orders linked to them. (Status, Start/End Dates, Term) , File storing, Data disasters while entering wrong dates or misspelled contract terms. 

The following are quick highlights:

• The Salesforce Product Catalog can model simple, recurring products with schedules
• Salesforce provides a strong and extensible data model supporting numerous objects that can be configured to support basic subscription services.
• Leverage Workflow and Reports/Dashboards for Contracts and Renewals
• Leverage Opportunity Reports for Quantity and Revenue Forecasts
• Leverage Subscription Orders and Contracts to manage subscriptions at the account level.
• Simplifying integration with Accounting using DBSync for recurring services from Salesforce
• DBSync can provide Assess level of support and Entitlements desired and configure appropriately Visual Flow or API’s to automate and create Orders, Contracts, Renewal Opportunities, etc.

Reach out to with questions or you have a special scenario that needs to be addressed around running your recurring invoicing.