New: Recurring Products (Products as Subscriptions)

Manuel Oliveira

Hey Pipedrivers 👋

The Recurring Products feature is being gradually released to all regions, with general availability expected by the end of April 2024. You can learn more details about this feature here.

Where: The new functionality can be found in the details side panel of a product and in the interface that you use to add products to a deal.

Availability: Companies on the Advanced plan and higher.

Harri Honkala

This is great! When it will be possible to show MRR/ARR/TCV in Insights?

NLatNWEnforcement

We also need a field for when the subscription ends/is canceled. Some products are set to be infinite but unfortunately most will end at some point.

Pedro Manuel Gonçalves Franco

Hi @Harri Honkala and @NLatNWEnforcement ,

Thanks for the feedback. We are currently looking to enhance reporting with subscription products/revenue in Q2 and Q3 this year and we can take this into consideration.

We haven't included the cancellation in this 1st version released and will forward the feedback internally.

If you have other inputs you would like to give, feel free to 🙏

NLatNWEnforcement

When reports are added, it would be great if there was a way to see the average duration of the "subscription". How long are our products lasting?

If these could report similar to how subscriptions currently do that would be ideal.

Nikolai Sokolov

Hi @Pedro Manuel Gonçalves Franco couldn't find the documentation for this:

Let's say I have 2 recurring products linked to a deal, with separate start dates:

• 1 product with billing frequency set to 6 recurring monthly payments (750€ per month), billing start date set to 1st of July 2024
• 1 product with billing frequency set to recurring monthly payments until cancelled (800€ per month), billing start date set to 1st of October 2024

Questions:

• Is the assumption that MRR for the above deal will drop by 750€ 6 months after July?
• How does "until canceled" work? Does the number of recurring payments need to be updated to factual cycles once the customer cancels the subscription? I.e. set to 48 if customer cancels after 4 years?
• Is the revenue still on the reports if the deal is lost? If it's open? I.e. deal lost today but recurring products are set to "until canceled".
• Will the limitation for number of cycles be clearly documented?

While at it, the payment plan limitation of max 36 payments needs to be documented too. Currently, one gets to know about this thru the error response from the API. It's a weird limitation in the first place, since it's not even a year of weekly payments, for example.

Pedro Manuel Gonçalves Franco

Hi @Nikolai Sokolov ,

Question 1: In the case of revenue reporting (when the reporting with recurring products exists), the revenue would drop 750€ 6 months after July.

Question 2: You are correct. It is current workaround as we currently don't have cancellation, If you want, you can put it under "Ideas and Product Ideas" section for us to process the feedback internally about it.

Question 3: Actually, the exact logic on how recurring products and revenue reporting will behave is still to be determined, so no clear answer at the moment

The payments limit is a good point. Are there other limits, especially Products related that could be useful to be easily accessible?

Nikolai Sokolov

Thanks for the responses, @Pedro Manuel Gonçalves Franco !

What about deal status? Is it affecting the reporting? As in deal open, lost or won.

Also, just to confirm: there is no way to have a report made for the recurring products currently, correct? So the new MRR/ARR is only visible on the deal itself, but can't be reported in Insight Dashboards?

On payment limits: definitely need to be proper documented at least. If possible, considerably increased. Not sure what the low limits are for but they surely prevent tracking small and regular payments within one deal.

Atzel Collazo

Hi,

I have a question regarding importing my customers into Pipedrive. While importing them, I wanted to include a product for each customer. Unfortunately, it seems that directly adding a product during the import process isn't possible. So, I used the Automation feature to accomplish this. However, I encountered an issue: the Automation doesn't include an option to update the "Billing Frequency" field when adding a product.

Even though the product is configured to be "infinite until canceled," the Billing Frequency field isn't updated through Automation.

Is there a way to bulk update the "Billing Frequency" for my customers? I have over 1,000 customers, so manual updating is my last resort if there's no other solution available.

Thank you.

Sara Orsborn

hi there, can you help me here. We are a subscription based programme and use Pipedrive extensively but we can’t get the revenue feature to work as our pricing is first 5 vehicles $65 each and 6 & beyond $35 each. Pricing is per vehicle based on that. Anyway we can do this pricing in PD. We just use deal value now.

Nikolai Sokolov

Hi @Sara Orsborn unless proper reporting on new recurring products is available - which is approx. Q4 of this year - I suggest creating subscriptions in deals. since there's a limitation of 1 subscription per deal, there's a bit of math involved, which can be automated. Example:

deal with 8 vehicles.

5 go for 65 each, so 325$ per month

3 go for 35, so 195$ per month

total value of subscription: 520$ per month

add 1 subscription to the deal with monthly payments of 520$

each time that client upgrades, create a new deal with a new subscription. this way, you'll preserve historic data when the upgrades happened and the reports on recurring revenue will be correct

Sara Orsborn

OK thanks, I will give this a try.

Sara Orsborn

HOw can i setup different subscription types to select for different deals. ie if 1vehicle its $65, 2 vehicles its $130 and so on. Instead of having to manually do this for every single deal? Thanks for your help here

Sara Orsborn

Could workflow automations automate this, ie if vehicle field has say 1 vehicle in, it will set revenue to be XX and so on….
Also, anyway to automate deal value being added based on a custom field number. and deal value to be updated based on revenue field? thanks

Nikolai Sokolov

Hi @Sara Orsborn, unfortunately, workflow automation won't help. But doing this thru make or zapier is definitely possible. The idea is this: every time a product is added, create/update the subscription item. I also suggest creating new deals for upgrades and downgrades and strongly suggest using products instead of custom fields to track purchases. Products = proper way of tracking deal values. Custom fields = unnecessary workaround. Products are the way to go, really.

So, add products > trigger zap/make scenario to update subscription.

Atzel Collazo

Hi @Sara Orsborn

I'm not from customer support, but I believe you could potentially resolve this using automations. It might be worth experimenting with.

Nikolai Sokolov

@Atzel Collazo currently, workflow automation does not allow adding or changing subscriptions. But it's definitely doable with zapier or make.

Pedro Manuel Gonçalves Franco

Hi everyone,

Cross-posting this announcement by Kulli about products forecast: Products Revenue Reporting.

Besides the Products Performance Report, now it will be possible to do forecast for subscription products in a new report.

Nikolai Sokolov

Hi @Pedro Manuel Gonçalves Franco got a question on ARR/ACV for recurring products.

Example: I have a recurring product attached to a deal with 3 monthly cycles instead of until canceled. But ARR still shows a full 12 month revenue, as if it was at least 12 cycles:

So, even though the ARR is 2250 (3 x 750€), it currently shows 9000€. Is this going to be addressed? 9K doesn't seem to be correct since the number of cycles is already preset to 3.

Pedro Manuel Gonçalves Franco

Hi @Nikolai Sokolov ,

Would it be possible in the Add Products to Deal modal to show how the 9000 is being shown/computed?

With Quantity=1 & BillingFrequency=Monthly & BillingCycles=3 & Price=750 & Discount/Tax=0 ⇒ Should be 2250 euros.

Nikolai Sokolov

Hi @Pedro Manuel Gonçalves Franco seems like the ARR/TCV gets refreshed after a while - it is now properly showing 2250! Just a bit confusing since it didn't update initially when I set it to 3 months. I suspect its a page refresh issue and those values do not update automatically when changing from until cancelled to 3 moths in the product modal.

So all good now, values are updated :)

Pedro Manuel Gonçalves Franco

Hey @Nikolai Sokolov,

Typically deal value and revenue metrics (ACV, RR and ARR) with products don't update instantly but take less than 1 second to do so.

Glad everything good now 👍

RichardS

When using automation to add a Product for example if the sales guy doesn't add I want to add the 20 users product which is setup as a monthly re occurring no end.

However when adding via an automation the Billing cycle isn't taken into account, the only way to fix is go in manually and update it on each deal, which doesn't really work.

Can you fix the Product add to take the billing freq defined in product table