From Quote to Cash: Leveraging the Salesforce CPQ and NetSuite Integration

As Salesforce changes its CPQ offerings— Salesforce CPQ to the new Revenue Cloud Automation (RCA)—finance and RevOps leaders are navigating a growing set of tools to support modern revenue models. But quoting is just the beginning. For recurring and usage-based businesses, the real challenge is turning that quote into accurate, automated billing and streamlined revenue operations.

In this webinar, Zone and our partners at SaaSCG will break down how to adapt to Salesforce’s evolving CPQ offerings while future-proofing your revenue operations with a flexible, scalable billing foundation with ZoneBilling filling critical gaps and ensuring seamless, finance-grade integration with NetSuite. Our experts will cover:

• Decoding the Salesforce ecosystem – The end-of-sale for CPQ, the rise of RCA, and how the market is evolving
• Bridging Salesforce and NetSuite – Why integrating your CPQ engine with NetSuite is key to ensure seamless data flow across quoting, billing, and financial reporting
• Future-ready flexibility – How ZoneBilling is designed to align with any Salesforce configuration, ensuring long-term scalability as Salesforce’s products evolve
• Real-world results – How recurring revenue businesses are automating billing, accelerating time-to-cash, and delivering finance-grade accuracy without sacrificing flexibility

ZoneBilling was built for recurring and usage-based businesses that need to move faster, automate more, and gain visibility across the full revenue lifecycle. Join us and SaaSCG to learn how to stay ahead of the Salesforce curve and build a revenue engine that grows with you.

‍

Transcript

‍

Jon Leipzig: All right. Well, thanks everyone for joining this session on quote-to-cash and really quote to revenue. We're gonna be talking about leveraging a SalesforceCPQ and NetSuite integration, which we have a demo of. But really just talking about some of the changes in the options for CPQ as well as the options for managing subscription billing, usage-based billing, and in particular, inside of NetSuite.

So, by way of introduction, my name's Jon Leipzig. I'm the head of the ZoneBilling Center of Excellence here at Zone. I started my career in accounting and finance, so for the first nine years I was a controller, CFO, I worked at software technology companies and, and was a user of NetSuite, as well as other ERPs such as SAP and Intacct, and also used a handful of subscription and usage-based billing tools.

And then for the last 10 years, have been in the NetSuite and consulting space around quote-to-cash at Zone & Co.

Josh and Bobby, do you guys wanna do an intro as well?

Josh Payne: Yeah, sure thing. Hey everybody. My name's Josh Payne. I'm the CPQ Practice Manager at SaaS Consulting Group. Been implementing CPQ mostly in the private equity technology space for about 10 years now, through, through these like kind of larger business transformation projects.

And then we are entering a brave new world with the, the sunsetting of CPQ and kind of what the, the, all of the other available tools on the market. So excited to talk through a little bit of that today.

Bobby Brown: My name's Bobby Brown. I'm a solution architect on the order to cash team here at SaaS Consulting Group, focusing on billing and revenue optimizations, and especially with integrations up to Salesforce and into Zone Advanced Billing.I've been doing Zone implementations for about five years and working withNetSuite for about seven.

Jon Leipzig: Great, thanks guys. And yeah, we're really happy to have SaaS Consulting Group with us. So they, you know, we'll talk a little bit about who Zone is and who SaaS Consulting Group is at the end. But you know, they, they do some of the bestNetSuite, Salesforce ERP evaluations in the ecosystem for private equity firms and some of the largest and fastest growing tech companies. So we appreciate you guys being on with us today.

All right, so with that, this is the agenda for today. The team's gonna talk about the Salesforce ecosystem, some of the historical changes and naming conventions and where it's at today, and the options for what, what you can use for CPQ. Then we'll talk about, you know, bridging theSalesforce to NetSuite integration and the options for managing billing and revenue.

I'll do an overview of Zone and ZoneBilling and what it is. And then Josh and Bobby will get into a live demo of a CPQ to NetSuite integration.And we're gonna be kind of focusing on amendments today because I think a lot of people underestimate the complexity of the integration when it comes to amendments and changes to contracts. But we also have versions of this where we can do, you know usage-based billing and pricing tiers, you know, going all the way through to revenue, but with the hour we wanted to focus today on amendments. But, you know, please give us comments in the chat if you have suggestions of things you want to see in the future. And obviously you can reach out to us and the team and we can do a, a personalized presentation for you.

Josh, do you wanna do with this quick overview of the, the CPQ and billing?

Josh Payne: Yeah, so just, just for anybody who may not have been hanging out in the ecosystem for awhile, kind of how we got to where we are today. Back in, in 2014 or even earlier, the, the SteelBrick team started introducing their quote quickly tool which kind of got acquired and became Salesforce CPQ which then was later bolted on with Salesforce billing and kind of became the revenue cloud space and the market leader in all of the all of the kind of quote to order and, and subscription management spaces within, within the CRM processes.

As of March of, of this year, Salesforce has stopped sellingSalesforce CPQ in favor of their new product, RLM, which is now called RevenueCloud Advanced, or RCA. So as of now, it's, it's not possible to buy SalesforceCPQ licenses anymore. And Salesforce is really pushing for for RLM, RCA and the, the additional functionality that it comes with there.

So really what that's done is it's it, it, it's opened up the, the market to a lot of other players where previously everybody was pretty heavily focused on Salesforce CPQ because it was a tried and true platform. Now folks are looking elsewhere and trying to understand, you know, is, is RCA ready yet? Is it is it really gonna work for me? Is it more than I need?

And along with those questions come with what else is out there, what else is available? So I think if you go to the next slide, Jon, we, we've got a bit of a breakdown of the major tools that we're seeing on the market right now. On that first column there is Salesforce CPQ, which is again, no longer available, but still kind of a baseline that we use to evaluate against and, and a, a kind of known a known option based on supporting leading practices.

Going to the right, we have a proprietary tool that we offer called CPQ Light, which is really focused on providing subscription management and kind of data structures without a significant, a significant implementation time or a significant amount of product and pricing based functionality for folks that are kind of looking to take a step into the CCP Q space or set up an integration with with Zone and NetSuite.

Next to that, we have new.io, which is one that we've seen a lot of a lot of really great functionality to be able to kind of fill that spot that Salesforce CPQ has left. They, they are much more focused on quoting and subscription management and, and support all the models that Salesforce CPQ supported and even have a lot of additional bells and whistles that that were lacking in Salesforce CPQ.

Next we have Dealhub, which is really what we think is kind of a gold standard for quoting processes. You can do all sorts of really, really extensive and, and mature processes around products, pricing and bundling and kind of commercial deal term creation. The, the area it tends to need a little bit more effort is around the subscription management space. So making sure that amendments and renewals generate clearly and correctly, and then also can, can feed into an ERP or a billing system as we need.

And then the largest, and, and kind of the newest of all of these, we have RCA from what we've seen, it's, there's still some feature parity that's needed there for for it to be a viable option for a lot of like, multi-year customers, or especially customers that do year over year price increases and a multi-year contract. And there, there's a, a pretty significant setup cost associated with it as well. But it does have by far the most features and the most capabilities of any of the tools on here. It just is coupled with that, that additional setup cost and total cost of ownership with some additional unknowns about the future of it, given that it's such a new tool and kind of what what types of stuff are gonna be released or fixed or, or, or changed in the near future.

So just to kind of a, a lay of the land for Salesforce friendlyCPQ tools that we've seen again, kind of evaluating everything against that known Salesforce CPQ line and seeing how does it stack up in some of these critical areas across the market.

Jon Leipzig: Great.And actually, not to put you on the spot, Josh, but of these, for a company that is, has usage-based pricing or is moving towards that, is there one that kind of stands out based on legacy CPQ, not being for sale. Anything that you guys would recommend?

Josh Payne: Yeah, I think new.io and Dealhub are kind of the ones that I think we've seen be the most favorable for those types of models now. RCA will absolutely get there.There's just so many more unknowns around it than, than the other solutions on here.

But yeah, I think anybody with usage-based pricing models, you're gonna wanna look more to the right of this chart as some more sort of more robust and more mature capabilities to be able to, you know, configure and present those those models.

Jon Leipzig: Great.Thanks. I'm gonna jump into some options for managing recurring billing. So the three main that we, options that we see when doing kind of a quote-to-cash automation project is within your ERP, within the CRM, like we talked about, you know, for example, Salesforce billing or a third party solution.

So I want to talk about the usual kind of benefits or challenges with each. So I think, you know, as a former controller, finance leader, you know, you buy an ERP so that you can do as much of these processes within that ERP as you can. And then only at the point where you realize, hey, there's some limited functionality here do you go out and look for maybe a third party accounts payable solution or a third party billing system?

But again, I think ideally, if given the option, you would choose to do it within your ERP, but there are limitations. But the benefits of having in your, in your ERP is it centralizes all your financial data. You're not swivel chairing across systems for your accounting team where you have togo into one system for this and another system for this. And then you still have to close the books and do reporting.

Typically the ERP will have stronger revenue recognition capabilities. If you are a company that has audits, you're gonna streamline that audit, audit in compliance because it's gonna be less systems that are exposed to that audit. You're gonna have a reduction in IT and admin overhead, again, just fewer systems and integrations to manage. It's typically much easier for reconciliation and data integrity across the systems because you kind of have one single source of truth.

From a cost perspective for billing, typically when an ERP offers subscription billing, it's gonna be, you know, a fixed recurring license, there might be some volume to it, but typically it's gonna be fixed recurring. So as you grow, you know, right, that that cost stays the same. And then again, even if you're using, you know, an external BI or reporting tool, it's gonna be one less system that you can export all that data into to do your financial reporting and kind of marry SaaS metrics, financial reporting, you know, get the drill ability into the customers, the contracts, the bookings, the items.

However, normally when it's in an ERP, since they're not purpose built for subscription and usage-based billing, oftentimes the limitations are it cannot handle complex usage-based billing or hybrid models.It typically lacks built-in data mediation. So if you need to apply formulas to the usage data. Or you have really high volumes of transactions that need to be kind of persisted and included with the bill so the customer understands behind the invoice all the data that that is associated with it. That can sometimes be challenging. Typically they have a challenge in integrating to the CRM and CPQ, and then oftentimes there's, there's poor support for con complex amendments or midterm changes, right? So again, that's what we, that's what we're here today to talk about is it's not that initial sale and setting up the contract and that first bill that goes out the door. It's the prorations, the, the swaps, the credits and rebuilds, and the changes to that contract that happened upstream from the CPQ. Oftentimes within an ERP, you, you're ending up having to cancel the whole contract and create a new one.

So the, the second option here is within the CRM there's a lot of the same value props as in an ERP, you know, it's gonna be less systems, but the accounting team is gonna have to swivel chair from the ERP into that CRM because there's now billing and GL posting and financial data that's happening there in payments. But it can be easier for sales and rev ops to marry bookings data with pipeline data, right, for reporting. It's typically gonna have a much easier integration to CPQ because it really isn't an integration, it's just, it's going straight from the closed opportunity, the order into the billing system.

However, what you introduce is siloed data, right? And that GL posting data happening outside of your financial system that you eventually, or, or need to integrate into that ERP to get all that data in to close the books.

And so what we, you know, and, and the SaaS Consulting group team run into is. A lot of data duplication and reconciliation issues. So you might not now have to have, you know, trying to match the item masters, the customer masters that are in two different systems. Also CRM usually doesn't have data mediation or, or the ability to process large volumes of data. And rev rec capabilities can also be challenging. There are some add-on third party solutions you might be able to use or you can try to use your ERPs revenue recognition capabilities. But to be honest, if you have any sort of total contract value that needs to be allocated or you need to recognize more than you billed, that is gonna be very challenging if you have the billing data happening in the CRM. And then as we talked about earlier, this can be quite expensive and time consuming to implement from what we've seen when you do it in a CRM.

So the third option here is a third party billing system, and there's hundreds of them out there. Some of them focus on usage billing. Some of them focus on SaaS, you know, fixed recurring services, billing, and they're purpose built for, for, you know, complex subscription models. They can oftentimes be faster to implement and configure than doing it in a whole ERP or within your entire CRM because they're typically handling less. And so data migration can be easier if you're not having to worry about in-flight contracts with revenue and where those are at. So these are really ideal in our opinion for B2C models or self-service where your customer can go to your website, signup, have that contract, you know, the, the gold plan set up in that billing system, and just automate the recurring billing downstream.

And if you have usage, typically they are purpose built for higher volumes and complex pricing. But if we look over to the challenges side, similar to CRM and even more, so, you're now triangulating across three systems, your CRM and CPQ, your billing system and your ERP. And you know, the question is, where do we do revenue recognition? How do we get all this data into the ERP so we can close the books and do financial reporting?

You're gonna have even potentially bigger issues in reconciliation sinks because you have three systems that you need to marry the item master, the customer master. And I think people often overlook the overhead needed from, from the office of the CIO, right, or these finance system teams to manage user access approvals, integrations with IPAs or withAPIs and as your business changes, right? Which, you know, I always say I've worked with hundreds if not a thousand companies, and if I ask them, has your pricing or product catalog or volume number of subsidiaries changed over the last six to 12 months, nine out of time, nine out of 10 times or more. The answer is yes, because these businesses are constantly changing their go-to market, their pricing, you know, the products that they offer. They're, they're building new products, launching 'em, trying new things. And so you need to now rework those integrations and those configurations between the three systems with the third party solution.

From a pricing standpoint, most third party solutions are, you know, usage-based, like based on your volume of revenue or billings or something like that. And so as you grow, as you add acquire companies, the typically the cost of these systems also goes up over time.

All right, so this is a good segue into ZoneBilling and what it is for those of you that don't know. So, ZoneBilling is a subscription based solution that is built within the walls of NetSuite. So we are former NetSuite consultants for, we used to do implementations and optimizations of NetSuite.Oftentimes our clients had third party billing systems, and we could not meet the requirements unless it was built into their ERP, so we could do rev rec or reporting. And so ZoneBilling was built to be that within the NetSuite ecosystem.

So the big differentiators here is it streamlines and mediates usage data. It handles much more complex amendments and plan changes to subscriptions. We handle more complex parent child structures, flexible invoice formats. It does plug into the native NetSuite revenue management module with some enhancements. And as we're here today, we're talking about the ease of connecting the system to an upstream CRM or CPQ, which in this case isSalesforce.

And you know, the goal is to make a scalable subscription billing solution within your ERP. So as your business changes, you can make those changes in the systems.

So kind of going back to our, our benefits challenges slide here, what ZoneBilling hopefully does is we then take those challenges that are normally seen within an ERP for billing and we turn them into benefits. And so again, as finance users that wanted to use the ERP for billing and revenue, hopefully in many use cases, you can now use NetSuite to do that.

Okay. So I wanted to quickly go over some, some industry trends and, and I guess kind of buyer decisions that we're seeing with the change in SaaS and the landscape.

So the first one here is AI is really accelerating adoption of usage-based billing. I think we've already seen this adoption happening over the last five to 10 years, but you know, AI has really shifted that and pretty much every company we talked to, if they didn't have usage-based billing. They are looking at launching it with some new product that leverages, you know, AI in their product.

Also the CIOs are often leading or very heavily involved in the evaluations of a subscription billing system or of a quote-to-cash a digital transformation project. And, and I think that makes sense because as companies are moving towards usage-based billing, these requirements are sort of becoming an, an extension of their product, right? There needs to be a seamless integration between their backend product, the outcomes, the usage, whatever that might be into the billing system, and then sometimes even return that data back into your proprietary platforms. And I, I do think the office of the CIO really values the consolidation and less systems that they need to integrate to.

The third one here is price is definitely driving decisions more than longer term or bigger outcomes. And so what we're seeing and kind of coupled with this, this fourth point here is people are trying to solve one problem, but not realizing that it could cause upstream or downstream problems in other areas.

Like as an example, Hey, let's just solve our billing challenge. But they're not thinking about how that's going to integrate to their quoting. They're not thinking about where they're gonna do revenue recognition, but with lower budgets, they might go, Hey, we have, we have budget to solve one problem. Let's look at billing. Let's look at revenue, let's look at, you know, CPQ. But, and that's fine. You can choose to do one thing first. You don't need to do Big Bang. But I would recommend you really look at how is this going to integrate? Show me how you integrate upstream to the CPQ. Show me how the revenue recognition is gonna happen. Show me how reporting is gonna be done. Because you would need to think about that holistically if you really, truly want to have a quote to revenue automation.

And the last one here is, we all notice it, but funding is down from VC from private equity. It is, it's down pretty substantially from last year and, and even more so from two years ago.

But what we're seeing is there's a lot of M&A happening. So what that means is your requirements for CPQ, for billing and for revenue, even more so than before, are going to probably change you could get acquired. Or more likely is you're gonna acquire other smaller companies and they might have a completely different pricing model, product catalog systems, and you need to be able to quickly integrate them into your systems and manage their billing.

So why this matters? We really think in a, in a, you know, cost savings environment like we're in right now, that automating quote to revenue is a competitive advantage against your competitors. Versus an operational drag that is gonna cost your company a lot of money and impact the rule of 40, your profitability and potentially even your revenue growth.

So again, maybe we have a bias opinion, but if we can l less systems is better, right? If you have more of them, that's more risk. It's more costs. Ideally, if you can, your ERP should be your single source of truth. You need to think about usage, billing, and how am I gonna scale my usage billing as my business changes?

And then additionally, think about your M&A demands. How is your business gonna change? And what are the requirements you may need down the road so you can truly have a scalable solution?

Alright, so to kinda close out here, what Zone delivers? We focus on operational value, right? Less systems, more automation, financial value, right, having less systems mean you can focus on things like decreasing reduced DSO. Reduce billing time, reduce revenue leakage. And from a strategic value, again, thinking about M&A, as your business changes, if you have less systems, you now have a solution that even though maybe it dos does more than what you need today, your business will change and can it handle those changes in the future.

All right, so before I hand it off to Josh and Bobby to do a demo of the CPQ to NetSuite integration, I just quickly wanted to go over an architecture diagram here.

So here on the left is essentially what we introduce intoNetSuite, the concept of a contract. And within that contract you're gonna have services, which are called subscription items. So these could be, you know, fixed recurring, they could be one time, or they could be usage-based, like this third one here, and they could have different billing frequencies, right?So this first one's built annually, this one's built quarterly, and the third one's bill monthly. These then basically set up charges, which are the forecasted billings into the future or for the current period. So we're gonna have one if this is an annual contract. Since this is built annually, we'll have four one each quarter, and then 12 charges for the usage.

And there's three main processes. So if you have usage-based billing, you're gonna be bringing that data into NetSuite. We will then mediate it, group sort, subtotal, maybe even deprecate before we rate it against, you know, a tiered pricing plan. And it'll create those charges for the period based on that data that's brought into the system.

The second process here is to do the bill run and the output is going to be the native NetSuite invoice, native NetSuite payments. We still leverage the native NetSuite customer master item master, so there's no duplication of those records.

And then the third process is syncing that over to the revenue management module of NetSuite. So we essentially collect all this data, the total contract value, and within our revenue configuration can create one or multiple arrangements or one or multiple elements to then start recognizing revenue.

All right. So kind of zooming out on that similar diagram this is essentially what we were looking at, what ZoneBilling injects into NetSuite.And the team now is gonna kind of focus on, okay, how do I manage what that looks like in Salesforce and CPQ from an opportunity contract and essentially an order standpoint.

So the team's gonna create that order, which will then sync over into these records that are in NetSuite. Before I do that, Josh, anything you wanted to add to this diagram before I I hand the, the screen over to you?

Josh Payne: No, I think, you know, like it's mentioned in here, the, the, this is kind of built against Salesforce CPQ but this model is something that we, it's a model that we use to evaluate other CPQ tools in the sense of like every, you should always go through a quoting process that generates these line items that ultimately gets down to an order to integrate and then create some sort of contract or contract line item inside of Salesforce that can be amended and renewed against.

So in that other model that we, or that other chart that we were looking at, all five of those solutions do this in that same way. And, and that's just a, a model that we've seen work time and time again for companies to to connect to an ERP. And it's what we'll show here today too.

Alright. So what I've got here is just a, a basic net new opportunity that is all set up with, with some, some products and all of that kind of stuff. On, on our quote, we have a what Salesforce CPQ calls, multi-dimensional quoting. Inside of our CPQ light tool. We call it ramped quoting. RCA is gonna call it something like a grouped quoting groups or some, you know, so slightly different terminology depending on the tool. But the outcome is the same here, where I've got a single product that is being broken into annual segments and then I can apply variability both in price and or quantity year over year.

This type of setup is extremely important ever since ASC606 orIFRS 15 to ensure that we can send over a, a, a forward-looking contract, TCV for revenue recognition. Whereas before, what most people were doing was doing, you know, one year at a time with an unknown price increase. With the shifts in the, the revenue recognition standards, more folks are, are almost exclusively doing a multi-year deal with pre-configured price increases. And then this can be sent down to Zone.

We have our start and end dates here that tell it when what to bill, when where to, if we had a usage table underneath this, like where, where should it be metering against? And, and plenty of just additional critical info that that's needed for invoicing and rev rec on the ERP.

So again, multi-dimensional quoting inside, or MDQ inside ofSalesforce CPQ, you'll hear it kind of something called something differently depending on the tool. But the model should always be the same of, you know, you've got your effective start end dates year over year for each product that you're quoting. And then you can you can pre-configure all of that variability and set this up to run for the next three years.

So I've already got this quote set up on the opp. We've got all of our our opp lines and everything here. At this point, you'd go through your normal sales configuration process. We always recommend as a leading practice, having some sort of a sales complete or an operational review stage because once I submit this to closed one, we're gonna trigger a ton of downstream activity. And if something is incorrect in here, it's a lot more a lot more data to unravel than if we, we have a human check this before we go through. So this is typically some sort of order management team or a finance team. Just somebody not quota bearing.

So what happened here is I moved it to closed one and my order got generated. This, again, is following that model that that we saw from Jon's slide there. But we generated an order to connect to our ERP, and then from there we immediately generated inside of Salesforce, what we call an automation queue.

This allows us to track the status of this integration inside of Salesforce. I would say nine, nine and a half times out of 10 if something's going to fail to integrate to NetSuite and to ZAB, It's usually the cause of a missing or incorrect data inside of Salesforce. But without a setup like this, we don't have a way to track when those things have passed or failed.

So we can see, I got a success message here. If it failed, we would've gotten an error and gotten some error statuses back in the order itself or back in the, the queue record itself.

And so if I come back here to my order now. We'll see that the last step in that automated process was to take our ZAB subscription ID and put it back onto the order in Salesforce and generate our contract to amend and renew against.

So this serves as a, a much simpler way to tie things out between the two systems. Our order ID will obviously be in NetSuite as well asBobby will show us here in a second. But that process of having that queue record inside of Salesforce and then alerting Salesforce by, by putting that ID back when it's success when it's successfully completed, serves as a really great handoff between the CRM and the ERP.

Bobby Brown: Yeah.Thanks for that, Josh. So now that that order is successfully integrated, we can flip over to being in NetSuite. So here from my dashboard, you can come up here and see that I have one news ZAB subscription that's been created today. I can drill into this and see that it's all ready to go for me, that all the information's come over from NetSuite. I've got my billing profile. If this customer was requiring a purchase order, that could have been sent over as well. We get our currency, payment terms and our and all of our items as well.

So without having to do any setup, this is immediately ready to be billed within NetSuite and say there was additional information that I wanted to see in Salesforce about the opportunity or who closed this because we're we're in line between the two systems, I would be able to click into this link immediately and it gives me a, it gives me a popup directly to this order that generated the NetSuite records. And this could also be a good check if you ever wanted to validate that all the information was just coming over correctly.

So from here I can see that, similar to how Josh set it up inSalesforce, we have year one, two, and three broken out. So I'm going to go ahead and bill our year one invoice.

Now for this process, typically as the leading practice, we suggest to do this via Zone automations in bulk, so that you're not going one by one through your subscriptions to generate invoices every month. But for demo purposes, we're going to go ahead and build this as if it's a one-off. So let this process for a moment, and here it's creating those invoices or for, and in this case, we're just going to get a single invoice.

Additionally from here, we would be able to set up automations to generate any of our revenue records. Either consolidate these down into single elements or break them into multiple elements for more of a termination, convenience situation.

However, now I can see that because I created that invoice, our amount billed is updated here and I have a new transaction. So at this point, we've transitioned to true NetSuite. I can see this is just a standardNetSuite, standard NetSuite invoice. The amount matches what was on that quote line and Salesforce, so the customer's not gonna have any questions about why their quote and invoice have different values on it.

And another one of our leading practices is for making sure whenever possible we're keeping these invoice PDFs clear, concise. As well as making the language and the amounts align to what was put on that quote originally in Salesforce. And then from this point, we'd be able to we'd be able to accept payment run any Dunning notices or or track collections progress on this newly generated invoice.

So now I'm gonna turn it back over to Josh so we can amend this contract.

Josh Payne: Awesome.So I've already got the amendment generated here. They're, they're moving slow today, so we are skipping a couple screens. But essentially what happened was once we got that order successfully integrated, Salesforce generated our contract for us against that account. And I just went and amended that contract which brought me into my, my now current configuration screen. I've got a start date that is three months after the start date of our original agreement. And we can see that in the net unit pricing on our year one line item where it's been prorated to not go a, a full annual term, but our future year lines are still at their full value because we, you know, they, they have not started yet and there is no proration in there.

Additionally, we can see that there's no there's no change to this agreement yet. So there are no totals or, or amounts due or owed in these scenarios yet. So what I'm gonna do is say that the customer, this customer is really enjoying this product and we're actually gonna go one additional license right now, and then two additional licenses starting in year two.

So again, we can see our subtotals update. This shows the overall net change to the total contract value. And we still have those, those total amounts and everything segmented out by those year over year start end dates. To, to tell it, to tell NetSuite and Zone stuff like don't bill this18,000 or this 19,000 yet we're only billing 6,375 right now.

So I'll save this one. I'm gonna check a couple of our operational fields and just make sure everything came through correctly. We're not trying to demo our error error handling functionality today, but we can if we need to. Same kind of concept here where, you know, the, the rep is gonna progress this deal through.

We always recommend some sort of sales complete operational stage where a somebody is reviewing everything for accuracy before we integrate, and then once that once that review passes. Then we will generate another order. That order will have more of that same information from our quote lines where we've got an additional 6,375 for one quantity. We have two additional quantities on our future year line items. And then the other main thing that we've done in this scenario, since this is an amendment order, we captured our original subscription id. So that when the integration is going and pushing all of this information over to ZAB, there's no question about where it should be sent to.

So if I have a situation where a customer may have multiple active contracts and multiple active billing streams, they may even have those those concurrent contracts with the same end date. This removes any kind of uncertainty around which one of those subscriptions and thus those invoices should these products appear on.

We always track this. It came from our original order that was fed back. And then if we check our integration queues back here, it looks like it is already succeeded. So if I refresh our screen now, we should now see that that same. We have our contract here, which has been updated. And the trigger for that was our subscription ID coming back.

So this, this allows you to continue to tie everything out by this same field rather than having to reference two separate fields. But we track this one separately so that both at the start of the integration, we can tell the, the systems exactly where to put these line items. And there's no question about which invoice it goes onto or which revenue arrangements it should be updating.

Bobby Brown: We're gonna switch back over into NetSuite and, kinda like Josh was saying, we have that same subscription in Zone that we were just using. The difference is we have additional items that have been added under here. So we gonna see the delta for that first prorated year for the one license, so well as the additional licenses for year two and year three.

And the the ease that Zone provides here is just automatically, not only taking care of this prorated line item, we're about to generate an invoice for, but year two and year three, rather than having to use NetSuite's group invoices or customization to manually consolidate across sales orders or manually merge revenue arrangements, everything is still sitting under the same record, staged and ready to go for us.

So now I'm able to go ahead and create a prorated invoice for just the year one amendment. And with, with this, as part of this process, you can also build out plenty of searches within NetSuite to monitor these new amendments coming in. And sometimes you need multiple ways to present it to your customers as well, where some billing profile customization can come into play.

But the, but you still have this benefit of you're able to stage the records before directly hitting your general ledger within NetSuite and have a lot more options than just your standard manual processes or your or any or any sort of NetSuite sales order set up.

So now I've generated this invoice for just this prorated term of April 1st to the end of year one. And we can show that term to the customer.So it's clear that you're not receiving a full year's value for this for a term that you added only in April.

Now Josh has one more example around cancel both canceling and creating new products on an opportunity.

Josh Payne: Yeah, in this, in this type of situation we'll say that the customer is just, is loving the product so much that they wanna upgrade to our higher tier, and they obviously don't want to keep the lower tier active at the same time that they're going to a, a, a better or a best package.

So in those scenarios, we need to cancel out this this subscription in this line item, and we can also, since everything is gonna be happening with the same effective dates, we can also go ahead and add our new product in there as well.

So to start this, this particular motion of right here of modifying the quantity, this is something that's a little bit different depending on the CPQ tool that you're using. But again, this, this process of creating some sort of credit amount for the current products and then adding your new ones, this should be the same in any kind of CPQ tool that you're evaluating.

So I'm gonna go in. I'll select our next tier up product. We can, again, see we have a prorated amount in year one because it's a $15,000list price, but we are doing a little over half of a year left on the contract term. We're gonna go ahead and mirror our license costs as well as, or our license quantities as well as our discounting and our year over year price increase that we had before. And what we'll see at the end of this is that we can, now, the, the rep at least can communicate to the customer before anything is actually invoiced, hey customer for, for year one, we're crediting back$19,000. We're adding a charge for 28,500. So you're gonna get an invoice for the remainder of year one for this $9,500. In year two gi they were likely not invoiced these yet, but the rep would still be able to communicate and we would be able to show in a contract output, Hey, your invoice was a $45,000 invoice.It's now gonna be a 67 and a $71,000 invoice. And our overall change in total contract value is a positive 55,000.

If for some reason though, we, we really didn't need this many licenses, we could reduce these and then we would be able to communicate to the customer like, Hey, you're actually gonna see a decrease in your in your invoice amount in, in a decrease in our overall TCV.

But this is a happy customer, so we're gonna keep them at the license quantities that they were at. And then at this point, again, it's, it's more of that same process that we've seen a few times now of get the, get the quote all set up. We're not going through any sort of process in here of submitting for approval or generating the document and sending it fore-signature, right?

But those are again, just all things that would happen for every single quote. The rep is still gonna be progressing these opportunity stages, eventually getting to a sales complete or a order management review stage, and then it will go to closed won. And like we've seen a couple times now, we're gonna generate an order. That order is gonna have all of those positive and negative lines grouped up within the, within the same queue. We have our original subscription ID. So again, we know exactly where to send these line items inside of Zone. Then we have a automation queue record here that is in process to feed everything over to the ZAB subscriptions.

And then once that happens, same as all of the other orders, we'll see that that NetSuite subscription ID get populated. And then we will see the contract get updated, which in this case would formally cancel out that original set of line items and then replace it with our with our ultra package.

And then Bobby, you wanna show us what that looks like inNetSuite?

Bobby Brown: So now that that opportunity has been closed closed won in Salesforce, we're getting another set of updates to our subscription in NetSuite.

So I can see here that now I have another amount that's pending billing. Our amount forecast has been updated and there are additional, there are additional records under here that have been set up to both do to both do negative and positive line items for this customer's next invoice. So now I'm gonna go ahead and create the transaction.

So we're going to have our negative offset and our positive amount for that up updated prorated amount for year one. So we'll go ahead and create this this invoice.

So that will provide the customer one transaction with that will consolidate that negative and positive. And then in year two. I am also gonna create an invoice to show how it will it will show only the customer's items that it owns at that point, rather than having to do a bunch of customization within your invoice, PDF for those consolidations.

So I can see now that I have two new invoices that have been generated here.

So this is for year one, that prorated amount for the positive 28,000, negative 19,000. And on the customer's invoice, they can clearly see how this final amount was calculated.

Additionally, in year two. We created this where, because the previous product of the Data Vault Pro had been completely canceled out. It's not even on this transaction for the customer, and they just see that they now own $67,000 worth of Data Vault Ultra. It's a much cleaner invoice, and there's a, you're going to reduce any of those questions you're, you're receiving from customers about how does this amount get calculated? Why am I seeing products that I don't own anymore on my invoice?

And just improving that customer experience in any way possible.

Jon Leipzig: Great.Thanks guys. Yeah, one comment I wanted to make is, so I know we talked about earlier, the end of sale for CPQ, legacy CPQ, and yet we're demoing CPQ. So the reason for that is there's still 7,000 plus customers on Legacy CPQ. They're not immediately going to be going out and trying to go buy Dealhub or new.io orRCA. They may be, well eventually down the road, but it could be years.

So most of what we see is still Legacy CPQ, but we wanted to at least talk about the shift in the ecosystem and what we're seeing. And if you are one of those companies that's deciding, hey, end of sale means there's gonna be less support, less product features, maybe we should consider looking. We wanted to talk about those other ones. And I, I think, you know, put it in the comments. We're curious if you want to see future sessions where maybe we do the same thing with new.io or Dealhub. We, we can set that up. But the, the important thing to mention is the data model is similar. So in particularnew.io and I think even Dealhub have a, a similar data model. And so it, it's, it's gonna be a similar flow. It's just gonna be in a different CPQ platform.Bobby, Josh, correct me if I'm wrong, but any, yeah,

Josh Payne: yeah, absolutely. And, and for some of them, like Deal Hub, I don't think they natively do orders, but that's where we always generate the orders from the quotes that Deal Hub generates because it's, it's just a, it's a proven model and, and it works really well.

Jon Leipzig: Yeah.And like I said, we, we wanna do future sessions and we can do more complex usage and changes to price books. We could flow all the way through to revenue.We had an hour, so we wanted to start this session with you know, amendments.But again, put in the comments if you have suggestions of things you wanted to see in the future, or if you want to put in the comments some things you're having challenges with and getting feedback from us or from other folks on the call.

Please, please put it in the, in the, in the q and a. All right. With the last few minutes here do you guys wanna do just a quick overview of SCG?

Bobby Brown: Yeah, so the SaaS Consulting Group, we're a consulting company that focuses onSalesforce, NetSuite and integration platforms, along with advisory services aiming to deliver leading practices systems that are scalable with companies.

We work primarily with software, high growth, private equity backed customers that really are focused on making sure that their systems aren't just ready for when they go live, but are ready for the next 10 years of their services. We make sure that we're allowing customers to not only bring in new acquisitions through their or inorganic growth, but also grow organically and ensure a holistic approach across.

All functions of the business.

Jon Leipzig: Great.And really quickly about Zone. So obviously we talked about ZoneBilling today, which is kind of our largest digital transformation product for quote-to-cash.But Zone does offer a lot of other products all built for the NetSuite ecosystem. So we have AP automation within ZoneCapture and ZoneApprovals. We have payroll products with our Zone Employee Portal and ZonePayroll. We have reporting and BI tools with ZoneReporting our data warehouse and Solution 7, which gets data NetSuite into Excel as a few, as well as a few other add-ons that just make NetSuite, you know, easier to use for those edge cases where you need a little bit more functionality.

We work with about 4,000 customers globally, which is about 10%of the NetSuite customer base. So if you have any interest in looking at the other products, we, you can go to our website, you can go to our YouTube page or obviously reach out to sales and, and get a presentation of the product.

By the way, Josh and Bobby, great job. I love seeing the flow from end to end. I think it's something that most people don't get to see.It's, it's a lot of times you're told, yeah, we can integrate. There's, there's a prebuilt integration or you can use, use an IPAs, but it's pretty rare to be able to see a contract creation and the amendments all the way through.

I would've loved to go all the way through to the revenue recognition to kind of, you know, round it out. But I really appreciate you guys going through it.

Bobby Brown: Yeah.And it's, the revenue piece is also very interesting because when you're in a fully integrated environment, you see even more so how all these upstream quoting sales processes flow all the way down into that rev rec process.

And now it's just important that people are completely aligned across all of your teams and processes.

Jon Leipzig: Yeah. And in particular, if there is any reallocation or anything like that it can get very complex and I think people really underestimate the issues they could have if they're not shown a demo, their exact use cases, you know, can they be supported?

So again, we'd urge you guys to as you're looking at this, look at it holistically. How is it gonna come from upstream? How is it gonna flow all the way downstream to revenue and even the reporting to ensure you're getting, you know, outcomes for your investment.

All right. Well, we appreciate everyone joining. Thanks everyone.