Billing Schedule Transparency in Revenue Cloud
Quoting complex deals often raises a critical question: “When will the customer actually have to pay?”
In Salesforce’s legacy CPQ, answering this wasn’t straightforward – payment schedules only materialized after an order was created, not during quoting. This gap made it hard to set clear expectations with customers upfront. Salesforce Revenue Cloud (RLM, RCA, RCB, ARM, <placeholder for the next branded acronym>) takes a step forward by allowing you to generate real billing schedules at the quote stage and display them on the quote or order form itself. Here, we’ll explore how how to implement quote-level billing schedules to improve the quoting experience for your customer, and improve alignment between sales and finance.
The Value
Implementing quote-time billing schedules isn’t just a novelty. Instead, it can drive real business benefits, especially for leadership concerned with revenue operations, customer satisfaction, and risk management. When you align the quoting process with billing details, you can expect several gains:
Improve Customer Experience... By clearly laying out when and how much the customer will pay over time, you eliminate confusion and surprises. Buyers know their payment timeline upfront, which builds trust and makes for a smoother experience. This transparency can reduce billing-related disputes or customer anxiety later on. Remember, billing frustrations can hurt retention – if customers keep encountering billing issues or unclear terms, they’re more likely to sour on the relationship. A well-defined schedule on the quote sets the tone for a professional, customer-friendly process.
Increase Sales & RevOps Productivity... Sales reps and revenue operations teams no longer have to manually cobble together billing schedules outside the system or field as many “when will we be billed?” questions. The quote in Salesforce becomes a single source of truth for both pricing and payment plan. This streamlines internal handoffs – once the deal is signed, Finance already has the schedule in the system. It also means less back-and-forth: your team isn’t manually calculating installment amounts or creating custom documents for each deal’s special billing terms. Overall, it reduces operational friction in quote-to-cash.
Better Accuracy and Fewer Billing Errors... Having the billing plan baked into the quote prevents the kinds of mistakes that happen when quoting and billing are disconnected. There’s no re-keying of data into an invoice schedule later, so fewer opportunities for human error. Disorganized quoting vs. billing processes often lead to inaccurate invoices and late payments or revenue leakage. By integrating them, you ensure what was promised in the quote is exactly what gets invoiced. This consistency reduces the risk of billing mistakes that frustrate customers and delay cash collection.
Improved Forecasting & Reporting... With billing schedules tied to opportunities or quotes, your business can report on future expected billings even before deals are closed. For instance, a SaaS company could project cash flow by looking at all upcoming billing installments from open opportunities in later quarters. It gives RevOps and Finance a forward-looking view of billing timing. Moreover, because these schedules are structured data (not buried in PDFs or spreadsheets), you can run analytics on them – such as average payment terms, the distribution of upfront vs. deferred revenue in pipeline, etc. This enhances your ability to forecast revenue and identify trends.
Stronger Contractual Clarity... When the customer signs off on a quote that plainly shows each payment amount and date, it serves as a contractual agreement of the billing plan. If a customer later claims surprise at an invoice, you have the signed order form to point back to. This paper trail can be vital in resolving disputes. It essentially hardens your collections position – there’s little ambiguity on what was agreed. As a result, you may see fewer escalations over invoices because expectations were set correctly at the outset.
Overall, aligning billing schedules with quotes helps streamline the quote-to-cash process end-to-end. It connects the dots for the customer and for internal teams, from sales promise to financial execution.
Configure, Price, Quote, then Order and Bill.
Not all Revenue Cloud customers were CPQ customers, but in case you were, still are, or can’t mind your own business, here’s some context.
Under Salesforce CPQ’s model, you could not produce a detailed billing schedule during your quoting process; even if you had purchased CPQ Billing, the product only natively creates billing data once the Order is activated… which really only happens after your Quote is finalized and Opportunity is booked. Beyond that, even if you were to develop some sort of custom solution, displaying that billing data on the Quote Document itself required heavy customization; CPQ Quote Templates natively display Quote Lines, but do not allow you to display records of any other child object without writing some custom code. Bummer!
This was a recurring challenge we’ve seen for Cloud Giants customers. Businesses frequently discuss terms payment in pre-signature negotiations, and this practical inability to fully communicate these complex schedules upfront created issues.
Time consuming manual work was required by sales reps, often in external spreadsheets.
Further manual work by the finance team was time consuming and error prone.
Customers ended up unhappy.
And even worse, now Cloud Giants has to spend the time to write about it!
Quoting the Billing Schedule in Revenue Cloud
In contrast, Revenue Cloud provides data model flexibility and document generation capabilities that eliminate those barriers.
In general, Revenue Cloud is built to be “composable” - yet another tech buzzword that means the system is built using independent, modular, and interchangeable components. In this case, this matters because while Revenue Cloud no longer boxes you into the “Quote, then Order, then Bill” data model, but rather allows much more elegantly for you to have a different sequence of operations.
For example, the “standard” way of doing things will still likely be to create Billing Schedules from Orders (which you might do by using this aptly named service). However, Revenue Cloud also provides the Create Standalone Billing Schedules API and invocable method that can take your Quote or Opportunity and spin up the corresponding Billing Schedule records. In other words, you can trigger the same billing schedule generation that normally happens at order activation, but do it on a quote or other object before an order exists.
From a design standpoint, when a quote is finalized (or when certain criteria are met), you can invoke the standalone billing schedule creation service. Salesforce’s invocable action makes it possible to call this in a declarative flow, so a Quote can automatically generate its related Billing Schedule records with all the installments, dates, and amounts according to a predefined template of rules. Essentially, the system treats the quote like a “transaction” and outputs billing schedule entries just as it would for an Order.
Crucially, too, you can base these schedules on standard Billing Schedule Templates and Billing Policies (the rules that define billing frequency, milestone dates, etc.) that you’ve configured in Revenue Cloud. For example, you might have a billing policy for “50% up-front, 50% in 90 days” or a milestone schedule for a project-based deal. Using the standalone schedule creation on a quote will apply those rules to the quote’s line items and generate the schedule records accordingly – before any order or invoice exists. The quote now has a full fledged billing timetable attached, which stays aligned if the deal closes and converts to an order.
Creating billing schedule records at the quote stage is most of the battle, but you still need to present this schedule to the customer in the Quote or Order form they sign. Salesforce’s new Quote Document Builder (part of Revenue Cloud’s native document generation) makes this straightforward. Using the Document Builder, admins can drag in a Related Record Table component to the quote template, configured to pull in the Billing Schedule (and Schedule Items) related to the Quote.
Comments & Considerations
When outlining this strategy, we’ve been assuming all along that billing schedules can be generated automatically based on quote and quote line data, rather than manual inputs. While this may not always be a possibility (e.g., custom, milestone-based billing), if that’s true for your business, we might suggest attacking this issue by simplifying payment terms and processes so that you COULD automate them.
We may also advise adopting Revenue Cloud’s native Ramped Deals capability, which divides a single subscription into multiple segments, each with their own dates, quantities, prices, etc. While this adds complexity and comes with its own considerations, it is often still the right solution for businesses who need to automate their billing schedules (e.g., three-year deal, with a 5% uplift in the second year and a 12% uplift in the third year).
Ramped Deals (source: https://help.salesforce.com/s/articleView?id=ind.qocal_ramp_deals.htm&type=5)
What if the deal doesn’t close? If an Opportunity or Quote fails to convert to an order (lost or abandoned), you’ll have billing schedule records that were created in advance. You’ll need a strategy for these “orphaned” schedules. This could be as simple as running a job to delete or deactivate them for closed-lost deals, or designing your flow to only generate the schedule once a deal is likely to close (for example, at Quote acceptance or stage X in the Opportunity). It’s an extra cleanup step that wouldn’t exist if schedules were only created post-order. Be sure to govern this so your billing system isn’t cluttered with schedules from deals that never happened.
In sales processes, quotes frequently undergo multiple revisions before final sign-off. If you generate a billing schedule too early, you may have to update it with each quote change. This can be difficult to design correctly, slows performance, and consumes processing power. Therefore, consider tying billing schedule generation to a “final” action – for instance, when the quote is submitted for approval, or when a user clicks a custom “Generate Billing Schedule” button after finalizing line items. You might also implement logic to regenerate or adjust the schedule if the quote’s values change. This ensures the schedule on the quote always matches the latest pricing and terms. It adds a bit of complexity (you’ll be managing a dynamic child record set), but it’s manageable with good automation.
If your org uses multiple quotes on an opportunity (only one of which will become the order), consider where to attach the billing schedule. One approach is to tie schedules to the Opportunity itself (since typically one Opportunity is one deal), rather than individual quote records. For example, you could generate an Opportunity-level billing schedule based on whichever quote is primary. This way, if the primary quote switches, you could regenerate the schedule. Alternatively, generate on the quote but only for the quote that’s destined to be converted (again, usually the primary quote). The key is to avoid duplicating schedules or confusion if there are non-chosen quotes. Design your automation to clearly handle this scenario.
Enabling this functionality is not entirely “plug-and-play.” You will need to configure the context services (Context Definitions) so that the system knows how to interpret a Quote/Opportunity for schedule creation (similar to how it knows to interpret an Order). You’ll also build a Flow or Apex callout to invoke the service at the right time. While it’s largely declarative-friendly (especially with invocable actions available), it’s a custom implementation.
If you’re not careful, you could end up generating a billing schedule on the quote and later on the order (when it’s activated) and thus have two schedules for the same deal. To prevent this, you’ll likely configure your Billing Settings so that orders coming from these quotes do not auto-create a new schedule (since one already exists). Salesforce Billing allows flexibility in how schedules are created (order activation vs manual). You might set the billing rule such that order products use “Manual” schedule creation, ensuring the standalone schedule you made serves as the source. Essentially, you’ll bypass the standard “Order to Billing Schedule” flow in cases where a quote already did the job. Coordination of these settings is important to avoid redundancy.
Summary
While not without its considerations, the approach outlined above can ultimately create a win-win scenario: customers appreciate the clarity (and are less likely to dispute or delay payments), and your internal teams benefit from automation and accuracy (reducing errors and manual work). In an age where customer experience and operational efficiency are both paramount, quoting with billing schedules is a practice that delivers on both fronts. It aligns expectations, cements trust, and streamlines the path from signed quote to cash in the door.
If you are currently on Salesforce CPQ and wondering “why move to Revenue Cloud?”, this is a concrete example of the advanced capabilities that can elevate your billing and quoting process beyond what was previously possible.
