Regardless of the type of business you own or run, revenue is the lifeblood that keeps operations alive. Yet actually recognizing and recording revenue – especially for complex deals – is an intricate process filled with accounting rules and financial standards. Thankfully, Salesforce provides a robust platform to automate and simplify revenue recognition to drive accurate financial reporting.
In this guide, we will explore how Salesforce enables companies to seamlessly track revenue in alignment with accounting standards. Discover how core features and purpose-built add-ons take the pain out of revenue recognition. What’s more, you will gain useful insights into key strategies including percentage of completion, milestones, and more.
Laying the Foundation
Before diving into any revenue recognition strategies, it’s important to have a solid understanding of how to configure Salesforce to support this critical process. At its core, the platform requires products, pricing, invoices, accounting rules, and reporting to be established.
The foundation of Salesforce revenue recognition starts with “Products”. Each product or service that will be sold needs to be configured with details including:
- Item name and description
- Unique SKU number
- Default unit price
Products should encompass all sales offerings across the entire catalog. Details like product line, category, inventory tracking, and cost can also be captured to enrich product records.
Building Customer Price Books
Once products are defined, they need to be added to “Price Books” that contain the sales prices offered to customers. Price Books are associated with specific Accounts and Opportunities to determine billing rates.
Price Books can vary prices for the same product when selling to different customer groups. For example, “Retail Price Book” and “Wholesale Price Book” may contain different pricing for the same products.
Automating with Accounting Rules
A key building block for revenue recognition are Accounting Rules. These rules act as the logic engine to automatically calculate revenue driven by certain conditions.
Rules can specify that revenue should be recognized when Opportunities reach a certain stage, when milestones are completed, based on percentages, and more. This helps to eliminate manual adjustments.
For example, a rule could recognize full revenue when an Opportunity Stage = “Closed Won” for hardware sales. More advanced rules can trigger partial revenue recognition based on customized criteria.
Automating Milestone Revenue Recognition
Many deals, especially complex consulting or IT services projects, involve milestone billing. Payment is made after predetermined milestones or stages are completed. Revenue can only be recognized after each milestone is achieved.
In Salesforce, every Opportunity can be configured with Custom Milestones that represent the major phases of a project. Users simply check milestones as “Complete” as work progresses.
The magic happens in the Accounting Rules. Rules can be created to release revenue precisely when Milestone 1 = Complete, then Milestone 2 = Complete, and so on. No manual revenue adjustments needed.
Milestone revenue recognition becomes completely automated with reports providing drill-down insights into revenue by milestone to validate accuracy. For project-based work, this streamlines otherwise painful revenue recognition tracking.
Completing Contracts with Ease
Many deals only recognize full revenue upon completion of all contract elements. This “completed contract” approach avoids complex partial revenue tracking.
In Salesforce, Opportunities moving to “Closed Won” status represent completed contracts. Simply using Opportunity Stage as the accounting rule driver, full revenue is automatically recognized at Close Won. No other action needed.
For accelerated deals, Salesforce CLM (Contract Lifecycle Management) further streamlines contract completion. CLM automatically flags required contract actions to users to progress deals. Critical dates, contract progress, and pending approvals kept on track.
Closed Won Opportunities, powered by CLM, act as the trigger for completed contract revenue recognition. Salesforce provides the tools to painlessly tame this method.
Visualizing Percentage of Completion
For long-term projects, the Percentage of Completion method allows revenue to be recognized gradually as work progresses. Unfortunately, tracking percentages manually can become messy pretty fast.
With Salesforce though, Opportunities or Projects can include Percent Complete fields displayed as progress bars. Users simply update the percent as work is delivered, after which rules recognize revenue tied directly to the percentage reported.
Reporting and Analytics at Your Fingertips
With all the automation supported by Salesforce for revenue recognition, how does one validate that revenue is being accurately tracked and recognized? Reporting, and lots of it.
Salesforce enables creation of custom Reports and Dashboards to dissect every facet of revenue. Key capabilities include:
- Report Builder: Drag-and-drop report creator for business users
- Joined Reports: Blend data from multiple objects
- Custom Report Types: Determine report layouts and fields
- Interactive Dashboards: Visualize revenue KPIs and trends
- Snapshot Reporting: “Freeze” report data at any point in time
No matter your role – accountant, auditor, finance executive, etc. – the perfect view into recognized revenue is available at your fingertips. Reporting ensures teams can deeply analyze and troubleshoot any recognition anomalies as deals progress.
For a long time, revenue recognition used to be an entirely manual slog. Today, Salesforce provides the tools to completely transform and automate this critical process, and even then, we have only scratched the surface of possibilities.
To truly realize Salesforce’s full potential, you’ll need to explore all options across products, accounting rules, reporting, and systems integration. While at it, always remember that no two company’s setup will be identical. Work strategically with financial leaders to continually optimize and enhance operations. Good luck!