SaaS, PaaS, IaaS, ... the world seems to be moving to an 'as-a-service' model. Instead of a big upfront charge with smaller maintenance fees thereafter, we're more often now establishing subscriptions that lower the entry fee but generate greater recurring revenue. And it's those ongoing subscription charges that really drive business valuations. But out of the box, Salesforce doesn't help much with reporting or forecasting recurring revenue. Typically, the Amount which rolls up into the forecast is the Total Contract Value, which may include non-recurring items, as well as multiple years of service. Yes, you can create schedules (quantity schedules or revenue schedules) attached to each line item. And that does help, especially with reporting on revenue in each period. But I don't find that a complete solution (though it is reasonably flexible given that you can edit each entry of the schedule). Over several posts, I'm going to walk through a set of Sal...

Our Salesforce org doesn't allow reps to enter a unit sales price directly. Rather, reps can only apply a discount to the list price. There are some solid reasons for this, most notably that we want to know what discounts are being applied, and greater discounts may require different approvals (higher discounts might go all the way to the CFO and CEO for approval). But a couple of problems result from this restriction: 1) Sometimes a rep may want to sell (or at least quote) above list price, and Salesforce doesn't allow a negative discount. 2) The discount percent allows just two decimal places, so we can't always get to exactly the price we want (try discounting from $350 to $200 !). 3) Even when it is possible to discount to the exact price, the calculation isn't always easy for my reps. So we often had prices in the CRM that didn't match what the rep had expressed to the prospect. Or maybe I would get a call to adjust the pricing. My workaround: A flow!...