Product recurring feature is not good for reports or handling subscriptions

Tal-Globe Tech
Tal-Globe Tech Member Posts: 3 VERIFIED MEMBER
First Comment Photogenic First Anniversary
edited February 20 in Ideas and Product Feedback #1

Hi Pipedrive,

The new recurring product feature feels like a downgrade and operates very clunkily.

  1. Subscriptions – When a client updates their subscription (e.g., price or user count changes), the system dynamically adjusts. However, why does it retroactively alter past records as well?
  2. Reporting – Revenue is not evenly distributed throughout the year. If a client pays for a full year upfront, the amount should be properly spread across the period, but it isn't.
  3. Stopping a Subscription – If a client cancels after, say, 5 months, the system requires manual calculation of all past months instead of simply allowing a "Stop" button. This makes the process unnecessarily complicated.

Are there any plans to work on those problems soon?

It use to work really well in the past and the recent change just made it to a huge mess.

Thanks

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  • Aronsp
    Aronsp Member Posts: 5 VERIFIED MEMBER
    First Comment
    #2

    Pipedrive really needs to take a closer look at this—it's not working as expected. The new recurring product feature feels like a downgrade, making subscriptions harder to manage.

  • Tony Xavier
    Tony Xavier Pipedrive Team Posts: 229 PIPEDRIVE TEAM
    Third Anniversary 25 Answers 100 Comments 25 Likes
    #3

    Hello,

    Thank you for your insightful feedback. With sufficient upvotes, we can increase awareness of the new recurring products, and our product team is always exploring ways to enhance our customer experience.

    I would like to take this chance to offer a potential workaround related to your feedback on subscriptions. By using the "Fixed number of billing cycles" and the billing start date feature, you can better identify subscription changes and manage updates more efficiently.

    I'm sure you would agree that keeping a record of subscription changes within a deal is essential. You can document each subscription change as a new product and indicate the billing cycle count for the previous subscription. For instance:

    Screenshot 2025-02-20 at 15.32.22.png

    In this example, I have the subscription starting out with 6 quantities, and after 3 months, it was switched to 3 quantities. By registering the changes as separate products, you will also have a track record of it and the report would show data like:

    Screenshot 2025-02-20 at 15.34.14.png
  • Tal-Globe Tech
    Tal-Globe Tech Member Posts: 3 VERIFIED MEMBER
    First Comment Photogenic First Anniversary
    #4

    Hey Thanks for the answer,

    Are more reporting such as MRR on the roadmap?

    Thanks

  • Aronsp
    Aronsp Member Posts: 5 VERIFIED MEMBER
    First Comment
    #5

    Hello Pipedrive,

    Thank you for your response, but the suggested workaround is simply not feasible in practice. I now have to manually update over 500 subscriptions every month by adding new products. This means everything is treated as a one-time product, making it impossible to track recurring revenue properly and causing inaccurate reports.

    Updating 500+ subscriptions manually takes me an entire workweek, whereas the old subscriptions feature automated this seamlessly and worked perfectly. How did this downgrade happen?

    Additionally, I’m curious—how are other software companies that sell subscriptions handling this in Pipedrive now? The current approach does not seem scalable for businesses with a large number of recurring customers.

    This is extremely important for us. Are there any concrete plans to fix this issue? If so, what is the expected timeline?

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