How to record income for multi year opportunities

Hi Ann Shackleton,

Your use of the 3-year product but only having a dollar amount associated for the first year in the RLI is something I would consider unconventional. I recommend one of the two following approaches:

1. Have the full 3-year dollar amount associated with the RLI. When the RLI is closed won, the resulting purchase line item would reflect the estimated annual revenue (dividing the likely amount by the 3-year term). The drawback here is that this may not represent the actual dollar amount you collect each year (e.g. if you have 2% uplift year over year, then the annual revenue field will be misleading).
2. Have your sales reps add 1-year product to the opportunity for each year the customer is purchasing. This approach allows you to set the expected dollar amount for each year and set separate close dates so you can account for customers paying as they go versus customers paying everything up front. One thing to be mindful with this approach is that your sales reps will need to set the appropriate service start date with each RLI so that their subscription is appropriate calculated for the full 3 years. 

Chris

For predicting/recognising Revenue per year for a multi-year RLIs/Opportunities, one option would be to  create a new module e.g. "Projected Revenue" which gets generated automatically for each year based on the RLI Start and End dates. The initial value for each year would be RLI amount divided by number of years. The user is free to adjust  the amount initially. However, once the amount has been confirmed for a year (either by the backend system or based on the date), then the record/amount becomes read-only in the Projected Revenue, thus locking the actual revenue for that year.

Some customers have implemented this solution to recognise revenue for each month within the RLI start and end dates.

Thank you this sounds interesting!

Thank you, very helpful

hey Chris Raffle

Option '2' of adding an RLI for each year works fine for selling yearly contracts, however many in the SaaS world sell monthly plans so this approach would be too 'over engineers' and cumbersome IMO.

As SaaS has been around so long now and monthly has become the most popular, would be great if SugarCRM implemented this ability into core.

With a monthly renewal model, staying within the bounds of Sugar's functionality would mean an opportunity per month with a RLI for each monthly subscription the customer has. I agree that it is not an ideal solution to have to maintain without at least a little customization. Earlier this month, we released our first products with monthly subscriptions and we will likely implement a scheduler to mark those monthly renewable RLIs as 'Closed Won' on their expected close date. Automating them being marked as 'Closed Won' then would activate Sugar's native functionality to automatically create the next month's opportunity.

Once we have that in place, I don't think it will be difficult to manage. However, it will create a glut of opportunities under the accounts with those subscriptions over time.

Chris