Help on managing a project which runs across several months, in different countries.
We win large projects which run across several months. We're looking for help on how to forecast these projects by month across their lifetime.
As an example:
We win a contract with a chain of fast food restaurants for the supply of all their tables and chairs. The contract is estimated at £1m for 2021 but it is spread across 1300 restaurants throughout Europe. Each venue constitutes an individual quote to be won and delivered. The contract runs from 1 Jan to 31 Dec 2021.
Questions and challenges:
- From a forecasting point of view, is there a way to input a start and end date of the contract, so that in our Forecast view on our Pipeline, the value is spread across the relevant months and quarters?
- We don't want to add individual deals for each restaurant we win and invoice. We will run a report at the end of every month on what we have won & delivered from our invoicing system, and we would like a way to scale that off the original 1m deal on Pipedrive. The challenge would also be to still show the value of that deal / contract as £1m on Pipedrive, rather than it getting smaller month-by-month as we scale off the amount we have delivered. Any ideas?
- To add to the challenge, although we win the contract as an international team, the individual restaurant quotes are raised, won, and delivered by our regional teams. So our team in France will quote for and deliver all the French restaurants; Italian team for Italian restaurants; etc. We have a pipeline per region, and these values will need to be reflected in their pipelines.
I guess what we are asking for is a way to show a parent deal for the big £1m contract, and creating a child deal at the end of each month for the value we have won that month, by country. So if in April we deliver 100k in France and 50k in the UK, we would like to create a deal for those 2 amounts shown in their pipelines for April, which pull off the original £1m contract.
Be glad of your suggestions! If anything is unclear please ask in the comments and I'll reply there. Thank you!
Comments
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I've pinned your post to the main feed so more community members can see it and help you. 🚀
For example @Bert Calatz , @Brad Krause would you like to chime in?
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This is a bit complicated for forecasting without making separate deals where an expected close date can be entered.
You could break each region into groups of stores for deals that you believe may go around the same time and forecast for that group of stores as a single deal.
But once the contract is actually won I'm having trouble understanding the value of forecasting anyway.
Here is an idea. If Italy wins a contract worth $150,000.00 and you know based on experience and the reality that it cannot all be 'delivered' in one month can you estimate the limit per month of potential and make separate deals for that max potential? say it's $50,000.00 per month. Then make 3 seperate deals to account for the total $150,000.00 for Italy.
It kinda feels like you are trying to do accounting using pipedrive or maybe I'm confused.
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As I interpret your question is it mainly about reporting and less about managing the process? If so, your questions are solvable. We can handle this with the possibilities of New subscription revenue report in Insight. On the other hand, reporting with information from an invoice application can also be made quickly in a sheet of course.
I have made an example how to solve it in Pipedrive. Schedule a short zoom meeting and I'll show you.
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I'm dealing with similar case.
On one hand I have deals and I want to know when certain deal has been won and what revenue it will generate - this is the full deal value.
On the other hand I'm interested in seeing orderbook information and for that I'm using "Payment schedule" which gives me a insight report on the value for the invoice each month.
The other possibility is to create seperate deals for every payment that you are expecting from this deal but when you have 12 payments you will need 12 deals and this is generating a lot of work and imo is littering your data.
I really hope that the revenue option in pipdedrive will be developed and will gain new features in the future.
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Paweł Kusina said:
I'm dealing with similar case.
On one hand I have deals and I want to know when certain deal has been won and what revenue it will generate - this is the full deal value.
On the other hand I'm interested in seeing orderbook information and for that I'm using "Payment schedule" which gives me a insight report on the value for the invoice each month.
The other possibility is to create seperate deals for every payment that you are expecting from this deal but when you have 12 payments you will need 12 deals and this is generating a lot of work and imo is littering your data.
I really hope that the revenue option in pipdedrive will be developed and will gain new features in the future.
Hi @Paweł Kusina ,
The solution for this is to register additional payments. This can be done in the same deal. You can then, for example, enter per month what (extra) turnover has been.
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Inês Batata said:
I've pinned your post to the main feed so more community members can see it and help you. 🚀
For example @Bert Calatz , @Brad Krause would you like to chime in?
Thank you @Inês Batata !
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Brad Krause said:
This is a bit complicated for forecasting without making separate deals where an expected close date can be entered.
You could break each region into groups of stores for deals that you believe may go around the same time and forecast for that group of stores as a single deal.
But once the contract is actually won I'm having trouble understanding the value of forecasting anyway.
Here is an idea. If Italy wins a contract worth $150,000.00 and you know based on experience and the reality that it cannot all be 'delivered' in one month can you estimate the limit per month of potential and make separate deals for that max potential? say it's $50,000.00 per month. Then make 3 seperate deals to account for the total $150,000.00 for Italy.
It kinda feels like you are trying to do accounting using pipedrive or maybe I'm confused.
Thank you @Brad Krause , that does make sense to create separate deals by store + month + region combinations.
The challenge we have is that the contract we win is technically just an agreement for the supply of all their furniture, but the actual value for each month / year depends entirely on how many stores will go ahead. It can often change by 100-500k a year if there are delays on their installation schedules. The salesperson responsible for that deal needs to be aware of this and top up his pipeline with additional business in order to hit his target - without getting bogged down in creating individual 5k deals for each store.
So it does make sense to create a deal per month with the estimated turnover, and just update it at the end of the month once we know the accurate figure.
Thank you!
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Bert Calatz said:
As I interpret your question is it mainly about reporting and less about managing the process? If so, your questions are solvable. We can handle this with the possibilities of New subscription revenue report in Insight. On the other hand, reporting with information from an invoice application can also be made quickly in a sheet of course.
I have made an example how to solve it in Pipedrive. Schedule a short zoom meeting and I'll show you.
Thank you @Bert Calatz ,
Correct, it is a case of needing to report accurately on the salesperson's performance by month / quarter against their target.
We'll definitely have a look at that subscription revenue report, it sounds like a good option. Would really appreciate a Zoom call, thank you! I'll reach out by email.
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Paweł Kusina said:
I'm dealing with similar case.
On one hand I have deals and I want to know when certain deal has been won and what revenue it will generate - this is the full deal value.
On the other hand I'm interested in seeing orderbook information and for that I'm using "Payment schedule" which gives me a insight report on the value for the invoice each month.
The other possibility is to create seperate deals for every payment that you are expecting from this deal but when you have 12 payments you will need 12 deals and this is generating a lot of work and imo is littering your data.
I really hope that the revenue option in pipdedrive will be developed and will gain new features in the future.
Thank you @Paweł Kusina ,
This is why we would have found it great to have a parent deal with sub deals. Hopefully the recurring payment option suggested by @Bert Calatz will help manage this and look forward to talking this through with him.
In the meantime, to understand what our top clients are, we will be just creating individual deals for each month's turnover like @Brad Krause suggests. Then when we want to look at our "Top 10" for the year, instead of running a report of the top 10 deals by value, we'll run a report on the top 10 Organizations by total pipeline value, if that makes sense.
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Hi Annalisa, we have solved this problem for a big company in Italy creating a split project for all fornitures. I think you are italian, if you want we can discuss about this.
Fabrizio
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Fabrizio Nicolosi said:
Hi Annalisa, we have solved this problem for a big company in Italy creating a split project for all fornitures. I think you are italian, if you want we can discuss about this.
Fabrizio
Ciao @Fabrizio Nicolosi ,
That's great, I look forward to talking this through with you. I'll reach out by email.
Thank you!
Annalisa
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Paweł Kusina said:
I'm dealing with similar case.
On one hand I have deals and I want to know when certain deal has been won and what revenue it will generate - this is the full deal value.
On the other hand I'm interested in seeing orderbook information and for that I'm using "Payment schedule" which gives me a insight report on the value for the invoice each month.
The other possibility is to create seperate deals for every payment that you are expecting from this deal but when you have 12 payments you will need 12 deals and this is generating a lot of work and imo is littering your data.
I really hope that the revenue option in pipdedrive will be developed and will gain new features in the future.
@Bert Calatz Thank you kindly for your time this morning. It was great to look into the payment schedule tool, Zena and I will be looking into how to use this function to manage a large deal and splitting it down into monthly values. We'll keep you posted!
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