To better support this SaaS world we live in, we've so far calculated and forecasted both the Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) and the First-Year Value (FYV) of our opportunities. Two more things to wrap up this series. First, I want to track scheduled payments. And then we'll create a report to track the month-end MRR under contract, as this is a critical metric for SaaS providers. Scheduled Payments I want to help my finance team to tracking payments that are expected from prior-period bookings. So I've added a custom field, Payment Amount, to my Activity Object, and added that field to the Event page layout. Now when I mark an opportunity closed-won and the opportunity term exceeds 23 months, I create an Event to record the scheduled payment(s). (For my purposes, I don't create a Schedule Payment for the initial billing, though you could if you want to record all billing events in Salesforce.) From the opportunity record, I record a new all-day event with no...

As GDPR came into view, I took a closer look at the security settings in our Salesforce org. Probably nothing novel about that statement, but I'll share a few of the changes that resulted. First, I ran the Health Check. It's under Setup | Security. It provides an immediate view of some big-picture security issues. I'll confess that I knowingly have not taken all the recommended actions. In some cases, that's for my own convenience (I do want to be able to log in as any of my users, and I don't want to log in under my own credentials after I log out under a user's id). But some of the isues identified are no-brainers and do leave you in a better security posture. But that's primarily about ensuring that the a user should indeed be logged in to your org. What about the permissions that those legit users have? I've taken a number of steps to further limit access to company data. First, I inherited an org with roughly a hundred users and nearly a d...