VP of Marketing
Hayley Coxon is the Vice President of Marketing and Revenue Operations for Prodly and accidental admin since 2010. You can find her on LinkedIn.
Prodly and ATG, a Cognizant Company, have launched a new Prodly data set template for Salesforce Billing. Prodly’s lightning fast deployment capabilities and duplicate record prevention measures will help Salesforce admins prevent errors when billing customers. As a result, the template will help businesses accelerate their ROI on Salesforce Billing.
Accidental errors when billing a customer are embarrassing and can affect your company’s image, potentially resulting in lost business.
Although Salesforce Billing is a powerful tool to streamline your billing process, you need to regularly update reference data, also referred to as configuration data, within this application to reduce the risk of billing errors. If the reference data is out of date, your sales and billing teams are forced to make manual changes. If they’re even aware of the error, that is.
Prodly provides an easy-to-use tool for admins to update their configuration data within Salesforce CPQ. This minimizes errors and potential losses.
Sonia Flamm, ATG’s Salesforce Billing Practice Lead, and Dave “Stuff” Stufflebeam, Prodly’s Sr. Solutions Engineer, collaborated to develop the template. It’s designed to help companies using Billing to succeed with the app self-sufficiently.
Sonia is known throughout the Salesforce community as a Billing evangelist and guru. She has traveled the world to train hundreds of Salesforce consultants and admins in implementing and maintaining Billing.
Stuff, who leads Solution Engineering at Prodly, is a reference data deployment expert and trainer. He has trained hundreds of Salesforce architects, admins, and consultants in deploying Salesforce CPQ reference data. He’s responsible for creating Prodly’s data set templates for Salesforce CPQ, Billing, Advanced Approvals, and Field Service Lightning (FSL).
Reference data defines the set of permissible values other data fields may use. Within Salesforce applications, reference data is how admins are able to use clicks instead of code to configure their Salesforce environments.
If you’re a Salesforce CPQ or Billing administrator, and configure apps like Price Rules and Product Rules, this becomes record data, not metadata. That means you can’t deploy it using a change set. Prodly and the Prodly template for Salesforce Billing are purpose built to deploy reference data from your Billing developer org to QA, UAT, and eventually into production.
During the initial configuration of Salesforce Billing, many companies utilize an implementation partner, like ATG, to ensure the application is properly set up. Regarding implementing Billing, Sonia Flamm remarked, “Billing isn’t simple. It has a lot more relationships between all these objects. There are a lot more interdependencies.”
There’s tremendous value in a well-implemented and perfectly configured instance of Salesforce Billing. However, it takes time, work, and expertise to get to that point—and can take even more time, work, and expertise to maintain it.
It’s best to perform both the initial configuration and ongoing deployments of Billing reference data using a series of sandboxes. Once the application works in the sandboxes, you can deploy it to production. Here, it will go live so employees can use it to automate billing processes.
You have to regularly review and update reference data. For example, billing schedules may change from monthly to quarterly, and any changes to tax law will need to be reflected in the reference data for accurate billing. Not every object in Billing contains reference data. Some objects, like quote, refund, and payment authorization contain transaction data. Yet others are for internal use only.
In total, there are 70 objects in Salesforce Billing, and 22 of them contain reference data. This configuration data defines the permissible values for each of the objects, ensuring that all bills generated with Billing are accurate to your business.
You can find a full list of Billing objects and their data types in the Prodly Salesforce Billing Reference Data Deployment Guide.
It’s challenging to keep up with reference data updates using a data loader and spreadsheets. You have to remap the lookup IDs between related records before moving them from the source org to the destination environment. This process is slow and prone to error.
On top of that, it can take hours of additional work to prevent duplicates by mapping formal external IDs before updating the reference data in a given org. Not to mention weeding out duplicates that have slipped through the cracks once the update is complete.
Prodly was purpose built to eliminate the challenges associated with reference data deployment. It offers three external ID upsert methods to simplify this error-prone aspect of the deployment process.
“It’s almost ten times more important in the Billing platform to deploy reference data correctly in the right order. Otherwise, you’re going to mess up your billing information, which is a really big deal,” said Flamm. “Prodly helps somebody who may not be an expert in Billing.”
Prodly’s template for Salesforce Billing makes our productivity-enhancing reference data deployment tool even easier to use with Billing. The template contains prebuilt data set templates that simplify the deployment process, as well as our complete deployment guide and expert support.
To learn more, request a demo.
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