Despite being a one-stop-shop for many businesses as it is, Salesforce has several features that you can enable to provide additional value. These features are not required for all businesses, but they are free to activate. In this article, we will introduce one of these features – revenue and quantity scheduling. We will discuss how they work and how they can help your business.
Revenue Scheduling
Have you ever paid for a subscription to a service? Perhaps you’ve signed up for yearly video streaming that charges monthly for access. On the business side of this transaction, tracking revenue earned over time is a necessity. But by default, Salesforce attributes sales and payments to one date (the Closed Date) rather than allowing for recurring payments. This means that without additional customization, businesses will not be able to track their revenue correctly over time. This may be fine for industries where a single one-time payment is exchanged for goods or services, but what happens when recurring payments are involved? If a company is receiving payments throughout the year, they should be able to report earnings accordingly.
With revenue scheduling, companies can easily manage, report, and forecast by splitting up their revenue over time. For instance, if a yearly streaming service costs $30 a month ($360/year), the company can record $30 revenue every month on a single Opportunity rather than creating new Opportunities for every payment. This allows companies to gain greater insight into their monthly earnings and operations by building reports or dashboards to get a top-level view of their performance. And when a contract completes, you can automatically create a new opportunity to pursue a renewal. To learn how to automate this, tune in next week for a more in-depth guide to revenue scheduling.
Quantity Scheduling
On the other hand, quantity scheduling deals with product units. Often coupled with revenue scheduling, quantity scheduling becomes useful for companies who deliver products over a period of time rather than all at once. A good example of how this can be useful is with magazines. A customer doesn’t pay for and receive a year’s worth of magazines all at once. Instead, they pay once a year and receive magazines on a regular basis.
By default, Salesforce takes quantity and associates it to the time of a sale. In order to correctly track quantity over time, you would have to create an Opportunity every time you send a product to a customer. But with quantity schedules, you can track several product deliveries on a single Opportunity. Operation teams, delivery teams, and managers gain visibility into how many items they need at any given point in time. With loot boxes, magazines, newspapers, meal kits, and many other subscription-based goods becoming more and more popular, quantity scheduling gives these consumer goods companies a way to track their products.
Activating Revenue and Quantity Scheduling
Activating these two features is extremely simple:
- Navigate to the admin Setup module
- Search for Product Schedules Settings
- Check the boxes next to Enable Revenue Scheduling and Enable Quantity Scheduling depending on what is necessary.
- With this activated, navigate to the Product you want to use with a schedule. If the schedule fields are not visible, modify the page layout and check the Field level permissions so these are visible.
- Enter the Schedule Type, Number of Installments, Period and check Enabled. This will automatically create the schedules once products are added to Opportunities
Revenue Schedule Information:
Quantity Schedule Information:
Want To Learn More?
If you’d like to learn more about configuring revenue or quantity scheduling in your Salesforce instance, get in touch with Ntegro today! We will be releasing more in-depth articles on this subject, but the most reliable way to be sure you are using them correctly is to work with our team. If you contact us online, we can offer a free consultation. We look forward to hearing from you!
