Setting up the Deferred Revenue Waterfall Dashboard

The Deferred Revenue Waterfall dashboard provides a forward-looking view of your subscription billing revenue. It is an optional dashboard included in Financial Analytics. To create the dashboard, Billing Central, Revenue Management, and Accounting must be properly set up. More information about the prerequisites is provided below.

Prerequisites

Before creating the Financial Analytics app, work through the prerequisites detailed in the table below. If your org doesn't meet some of the requirements, you might still be able to create the Deferred Revenue Waterfall dashboard, but it might not work properly.

Prerequisites for Creating the Dashboard

Prerequisite

Description

Related Help Page

The Enabling Revenue Recognition for BC feature must be enabled using the Feature Console. This creates the required fields on the Billing Contract Line Item and Revenue Schedule objects, as well as the required settings records. Enabling Revenue Recognition for Billing Contracts
The Company field must be populated for every billing contract record in your org. By default, the Company field is not a mandatory field in Billing Central. However, this value is required for the dashboard to work properly. We recommend marking the field as required in the relevant page layouts. Billing Contract Fields
Each Foundations company in your org must be linked to an Accounting company record.

This is required to link the data from Revenue Management and Billing Central to data from Accounting.

You can link the companies by using the Accounting Company lookup on a Foundations company record. You can also automate this process using the Company integration.

Companies

Setting up Company Integration

Each user who will be using the dashboard must have access to the relevant Accounting companies, via a user company record. This is required because the dashboard only displays data for the companies that the user has access to. If you want to change this, you must modify the security predicate of the Revenue Waterfall dataset after creating the app. Assigning Users to Companies
Recognition years and periods must be created in Revenue Management for the full duration of all your billing contracts. This is required to link the recognition periods to financial periods in the dashboard. Creating Recognition Years and Periods
Financial years and periods must be created in each Accounting company for the full duration of all your billing contracts. Your financial years and periods must exactly match your recognition years and periods. If a company's financial period doesn't match a recognition period, the data for the company's contracts might be incorrect or excluded entirely from the dashboard. Creating Years and Periods

Both you and the Integration User must be assigned the following permission sets:

  • Billing Central Analytics Read Access
  • RevMan Analytics

These contain access for the required managed fields in Billing Central and Revenue Management. Supported Environment
The Integration User must have read access to the field specified in the Recognized To Date Value field on the Revenue Management settings record for the Billing Contract Line Item object.

This is required to populate the Total Recognized value in the Revenue Waterfall dataset.

You must manually provide access to this unmanaged field.

Supported Environment
If you use multiple-elements arrangements in Revenue Management, the Integration User must have read access to the field on the Performance Obligation Line Item object that looks up to the Billing Contract Line Item object. The API name of this field is defined in the POLI Source Lookup field on the Revenue Management settings record.

This is required to link revenue schedules to billing contract line items via performance obligations and performance obligation line items.

You must manually provide access to this unmanaged field.

Supported Environment
Warning:

If you use multiple-element arrangements and you recognize revenue against performance obligations, the recognized to date value is not automatically updated on a billing contract line item. This means that the Recognized to Date amount in the dashboard is always set to zero, and that the Opening Balance and Remaining to Recognize values might not be correct. In this case, you must manually create a process that updates the recognized to date value on a billing contract line item when revenue is recognized for the related performance obligation.

While creating the Financial Analytics app, you must answer "Yes" to question 9a. Do you want to create the Revenue Waterfall dataset? in the configuration wizard. You can use the remaining questions on the same wizard page to include additional fields in the Custom View table.

After creating the Financial Analytics app, you can customize how the Custom View table is displayed in the dashboard. For more information, see Customizing the Deferred Revenue Waterfall Custom View.

Once the app is created, if required, you can change the security predicate of the Revenue Waterfall dataset. By default, the dataset only displays billing contracts for companies that the user has access to.

Customizing the Deferred Revenue Waterfall Custom View

You can customize default columns displayed in the Custom View details table. To perform these steps, you must be assigned the CRM Analytics Platform Admin permission set. Otherwise, you can only make local settings changes for your current session.

To customize the table:

  1. From Analytics Studio, open the Deferred Revenue Waterfall dashboard.
  2. Click the Custom View tab.
  3. Click Edit to start editing the dashboard.
  4. Click , then click Pick Initial Values.
  5. Use the following drop-down selectors to add or remove columns from the table:
  6. Click Done.
  7. Click Save.
  8. Click Save to confirm the action.
Warning:

Depending on your screen resolution and the number of fields that you include in the table, you might not be able to see the Revenue by period columns. If this happens, you must exclude some of the fields or manually reduce the width of the columns to view the Revenue by period columns. When at least one period displays, you can use the horizontal scroll bar to view the remaining periods.

See the Salesforce Help for more information about using dashboards in Analytics.