Formula for recognizable revenue.
Our company offers both one time purchase and subscription products. One of the company goals is the move the majority of our business into a SaaS platform, but of course that requires that you account for money a little differently than a traditional one point in time sale.
Enter the recognizable revenue field. I need a way to take the actual payment and create a calculation that will tell me how much revenue I can attribute to sales for each month over the length of the subscription.
Turns out this one is an easy one.
Create a field to capture subscription length
I need a user input field that tells me how long, in months, the length of the subscription is. Since our subscriptions can range from a few days to a few years, I have to rely on the users to tell me this value. To do this I created a number field forced it to two digits and no decimals and gave it help text letting the users know that the subscription length should be entered in months and if the subscription length is less than one month to enter "1" since we can account for the entire revenue value that month.
This field is required, since I need it to be entered for every online subscription.
Why not a validation rule only for our SaaS products? Well that would actually be a good idea, but I was requested to make it mandatory regardless of the product type. I suspect there may be something that we may revisit later and need for our non-SaaS platforms as well.
Create a formula to calculate the length
While the subscription length is required for everyone, I only really want to know the revenue value for those in the SaaS product lines.
The determination of SaaS product line is based on a picklist so..
Where I divide the actual revenue by the subscription length only for products that meet the SaaS options, and just flow the value for the remaining product lines. This is pretty simple right now because I have one switch to qualify off of. I suspect that will change in the future and we can add more to this content when it does.