Renewals With Sage Intacct and Salesforce

• October 4, 2017
• Kathy Jastrzebski

How do you track renewals? Perhaps you have a custom field in Sage Intacct on your Customer which tracks the initial contract date and you rely on someone manually entering that field when a new customer is established. Or perhaps you have an excel workbook tracking customer renewals. Maybe it’s even on paper somewhere in filing cabinets. This small piece of information is vital so that you can run a monthly renewals report to see all customers who’s renewal is coming up and, depending on your business, either send a new contract or, in the case of evergreen contracts which automatically renew, you may just want to analyze what products and services are in those contracts up for renewal and offer customers the opportunity to upgrade at the time of their renewal. Both are perfectly logical and important business reasons to track renewal date. Why leave this important information at risk of human error, when you could automate a portion of it?

With a little bit of Salesforce magic, you can do just that! So let’s walk through one way you could track renewals in Salesforce.

How does it work?

Step 1: Set up a custom field on the Opportunity record for “Sales Invoice Date”.

When a new Sales Invoice is created for an Opportunity and the Sales Invoice Date field is blank (meaning no invoices have yet been created for this opportunity), process builder will autopopulate this field for us (we’ll show you how to do this in step 2). But first, let’s start simple and show you how to add this custom field:

1. Go To: Setup > Build > Customize > Opportunities > Fields
2. Scroll down this page to the “Custom Fields & Relationship” section where you can click the “New” button to add a new field
3. Select the field type of “Date”
4. Give it a label and API id (Sales Invoice Date)
5. Save

Step 2: Using Salesforce’s Process Builder, set up the following process to auto-fill the “Sales Invoice Date” on the Opportunity.

If the Sales Invoice Date field is blank on the opportunity, when the Sales Invoice is created in Sage Intacct for this opportunity, it will auto-populate the “Sales Invoice Date” for you. Even better, if you change the date on the invoice in Sage Intacct, it also changes it in Salesforce on the opportunity. So if I accidentally invoice my customer on 12/31/2017 and then go back and change that to 12/15/2017 it will update the Sales Invoice Date field for me. Got it? Okay! Enough background then, here’s the fun part:

1. Go To: Setup > Build > Create > Workflow & Approvals > Process Builder
2. Click the New button
3. Fill out the following and click Save:
4. Add the Object: (Sales Invoice) What object should trigger the process? In this case it is the creation or update of a Sales Invoice object. Save!
5. Add Criteria: You can add criteria to only have the action trigger when certain conditions are met (ie a field is empty or a certain value) or just execute with no criteria. Save!
6. Add Immediate Actions: What should the process do when the conditions are met? Save!
7. Activate!

Step 3: Set up another custom field on the Account for Renewal Date to look at the field on the related opportunities and find the earliest one.

No extra explanation needed for this one, so let’s just show you how it’s done!

1. Go To: Setup > Build > Customize > Accounts > Fields     
2. Scroll down this page to the “Custom Fields & Relationship” section where you can click the “New” button to add a new field
3. Select the field type of “Roll-Up Summary”
4. Give it a label and API id.
5. Define the Summary Calculation: This will look at the auto-populated Sales Invoice Date field and find the earliest date thereby populating the renewal date of the contract with the customer.

Then, voila!, the Renewal Date field on the opportunity will always display the earliest date of the opportunities that it has related to it as long as all opportunities have sales invoice dates:

Step 4: Create a Salesforce report that you can run monthly which shows you renewals for each month.

Do you have an interesting Sage Intacct or Salesforce business requirement which you’d like some outside consultation on that is vital for your business but perhaps currently at risk of human error and could use some automation. Reach out to us here!

Tags: Customization, Renewals, SalesForce, Automation and Customizations, Integrations, Sales and Order Entry | No Comments »