Does anyone know if it's possible to use the master/sub opportunity feature in SalesForce to track usage for subscriptions in SuiteBilling? I have a client that wants SalesForce to provide usage information to NetSuite, but not in the form of a usage record... That being said, the thought is that usage data would be uploaded as a sub opportunity to the master opportunity each month... I know the typical integration is opportunity -> sales order, but curious if anyone has built anything different that works well... Also open to hearing ideas on passing usage information from SF to NS SuiteBilling, as well as passing a date over to automatically activate the subscription.

I don't know how SuiteBilling works, or is different from the Recurring Billing bundle, but with the older RB bundle (which we use) usage data records are required for any usage-based charges to be generated. Without usage records, it would seem that SuiteBilling would have to connect to SF every time it needed to generate charges, which could be problematic. Is there a mechanism in SuiteBilling to provide external data sources for usage-based charges? We haven't been able to move to SuiteBilling because our invoice volumes are too high, but I am curious to know how it is working for other customers.

Good points... I think I found a few options we can use... What is your invoice volume currently? I was recently informed that they removed any volume limit that was previously set.

Good to know. We were previously told there was a hard limit of 25,000 before, so they were hesitant to recommend it to us as we were quite close to that. I'll have to ask the SuiteBilling team about that next week. Also, we have several years' worth of history in the RB bundle that we'd potentially lose, so there would be some pain for us in the transition. As for opportunities, how do they feed usage into the subscription? Is it a one time data point? We have a perpetual model where customers use a metered service daily, and we continually upload their usage to the NetSuite subscription each day for billing. RB has a dedicated Usage Data record type, which is the main way to have usage based charges. The other involve usage history or fixed usage, but they haven't been very useful for us.

Yeah, I can confirm that they took away that limit. One of their Senior architects for the platform told me that NetSuite put that limit in place in 2017 to ensure the platform could handle that volume without performance issues. Now that the product is more established, that limit is no longer relevant.. However, I do think that some customers with super high volume have switched to a dedicated environment to ensure high performance is maintained.

I assumed so. We looked at their demo of SuiteBilling last year, and it looked very similar in structure to Recurring Billing in their diagrams, but with some additional functionality not present in our current bundle.

Exactly! I have been working with Frank Schaefer; I would definitely recommend him to others.

Okay. We decided against adding one-time charges to subscriptions, just because we didn't want to pollute them with one time charges that the finance teams would then have to see and mentally ignore thereafter. We use a separate integration (from a Salesforce connected app) to create Invoices or Cash Sales for any one time charges, and keep them separate from the subscription-based billing

Thanks so much for that info! Reassures that we are on the right track.

Zone Advanced billing seemed promising in that billing was based off of saved search results. In theory, you could use formulas to customized the ZAB rating engine. We are considering it among our options when the time comes to upgrade.

If you decide to go with that, you'll have to let me know your thoughts.. It looks very similar to SuiteBilling.

we are likely at least a year away from making any changes to our billing engine, but are always on the lookout for a better option