Overview of Recurring Opportunity Products
Recurring schedules in opportunities enables you to enter and track opportunity products or product groups that are part of a subscription business model.
The subscription business model applies to the sale of goods, software, or services where the customer is required to pay a subscription price for access to the goods, software, or services, with additional usage or pay-as-you go charges in some cases. Some examples are:
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Data and phone services
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Credit collection or payment processing services
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Software, platform, or data-as-a-service costs
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Magazine subscriptions
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Product life cycle costs
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Engineering and infrastructure services
The subscription model can encompass both business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) customers. For example, a telecommunications company may sell mobile phone services to individuals, and multiple phone lines to a business for their employees. The supplier of these services typically charges the customer a periodic rate applicable to the plan that they subscribed to.
After you define a schedule for a subscription product or service, the application creates the recurring transactions from the frequency and the number of transactions specified in the schedule. There are several time frequencies to choose from, such as weekly, monthly, quarterly, yearly, and so on. The multiple frequencies make it easy to set up a recurring schedule, like a monthly subscription for three years, or a biweekly annual subscription. You can review the schedule and quickly add a one-time registration or installation fee, and adjust the amount or date of any transaction.
Subscription changes are easy to manage. If there is a change in the terms or price of the subscription, you can quickly define a new schedule to replace the previous one. If the original subscription is extended, say, for another year, you can easily extend the existing schedule on the product for the period that you want.
Product amounts from recurring schedules are summed into the corresponding quarterly or yearly periods, and are readily available in pipeline reports and forecast rollups for you and sales managers.