topic Re: Recognizing revenue over a period of time in Sales Hub Tools

Recognizing revenue over a period of time

YPirmohamed — Fri, 21 Feb 2025 13:40:17 GMT

We're using Sales Hub Enterprise and need to be able to recognize revenue over a period of time.

In one case, let's say we close a deal for £12,000. That deal is due to be delivered across 12 months. £1,000 month 1, £1,000 month 2 and so on.... the revenue should be attributed at £12,000 for the next 12 months, rather than one £12,000 recognition at the point of sale.

The second case is recognizing revenue at the point of delivery - so say we close a deal in January for £5,000, we dont want to show the money then, we want to attribute the revenue in May when the service will be delivered.

I've been racking my brain on this and I think there is an Ops Hub solution for this but we would like to not have to get another hub to do this.

Any help is much appreciated!

Re: Recognizing revenue over a period of time

PamCotton — Fri, 21 Feb 2025 22:41:56 GMT

Hey @YPirmohamed, Happy Friday!

Currently, our native revenue tracking doesn't fully support scheduled revenue recognition, but you can create custom properties and use workflows to distribute revenue over time.

Custom reports and forecasting tools might also help visualize revenue attribution.

To our top experts, @TomM2 and @RSchweighart do you have any other recommendations for @YPirmohamed matter?

Thank you,

Pam

Re: Recognizing revenue over a period of time

RSchweighart — Fri, 21 Feb 2025 23:16:52 GMT

Hi @YPirmohamed,

Do you process payments in HubSpot? If not, we may need to explore some alternatives to the suggestion below.

For case one, when you set up the payment processing through quotes or invoices or a payment link, you can have it bill £1,000 per month for 12 months at whatever start date you choose. In reporting, you could combine deals and payments to view payment date on the x-axis and sum(amount paid) on the y-axis. Something like this:

For the second case, you may want to add a Service Start Date or Service Delivery Date as a deal property to use it in reporting. Then, you could have Service Start Date on the x-axis and sum(amount) on the y-axis.

For more granularity, you could add the start date as a product property that you can populate when adding products as line items to a record. This would only be needed if you have line items with varying service start dates for any single deal.

I hope this gets us started down the right path. Curious whether this seems viable or if we need to keep exploring different ways to view your revenue.

All the Best,

Ryan Schweighart

Whole Hart Impact, LLC

whimpact.co

I help businesses with HubSpot and Zapier.

Re: Recognizing revenue over a period of time

YPirmohamed — Mon, 24 Feb 2025 09:21:15 GMT

Hi Ryan,

Thanks for this. We're not processing payments in Hubspot. I am just setting up so that we can now create invoices in Hubspot and push to Xero. I've looked at the integration and it seems that once the invoice is paid in Xero, it will appear as paid in Hubspot.

Your solution for the second case seems logical - let me give it a shot and see what happens.

As for the first case, seeing that we're not processing payments in Hubspot, could we use a custom object and then attach properties to it? Something like "monthly billings" which will allow us to see whats "billed" monthly (even though the client has paid upfront), and also allow us to forecast future revenue?

Re: Recognizing revenue over a period of time

YPirmohamed — Tue, 25 Feb 2025 11:25:57 GMT

@RSchweighart - checking in

Re: Recognizing revenue over a period of time

RSchweighart — Tue, 25 Feb 2025 15:39:13 GMT

Hi @YPirmohamed,

HubSpot's integration only syncs invoices from Xero to HubSpot. Cloudify has an integration that syncs invoices from HubSpot to Xero, but you may have to pay for it. To sync from HubSpot to Xero, that can be done using the API. I leverage Zapier for this and could show you how to set it up, if needed.

Which direction do you want the sync to go? It seems like you mentioned both directions in your first paragraph.

A custom object could be a solution, but I am usually hesitant to set one up until we've exhausted out of the box options. Have you considered leveraging line items?

Here's an example of how both cases you mentioned could be captured even on the same deal.

If you leveraged line items like this, it becomes difficult to generate invoices as you'd have to create a quote first. I'm wondering if you need to capture invoice information in HubSpot? How are you processing payments?

All the Best,

Ryan Schweighart

Re: Recognizing revenue over a period of time

YPirmohamed — Mon, 03 Mar 2025 13:05:27 GMT

Thanks Ryan,

Your solution is great but I don't think it would work in this scenario. I've gone ahead and create a custom object and leveraged workflows to create records associated with the properties. It seems to have worked well.

Payments are being done through Xero (BACS) at present. That said, I would like invoices to be raised by the sales team in Hubspot and pushed to Xero using Zapier - I have not used Zapier before so if you could assist with pushing invoices from HubSpot to Xero that would be great. Once the invoice is marked as paid in Xero, I would like that invoice to be marked as "paid" in Hubspot as well.

Re: Recognizing revenue over a period of time

RSchweighart — Mon, 03 Mar 2025 22:15:41 GMT

You're welcome, @YPirmohamed.

Here are some screenshots showing a zap I setup syncing from HubSpot to Zapier. It is pretty involved, so hopefully you won't need this much complexity. You'd want to set up a separate zap to sync from Xero to HubSpot.

To trigger, you'll want to create a Private App and use a webhook step in Zapier to receive something like an invoice status update.

Private App setup

I am considering doing a screen recording showing a simpler, yet detailed breakdown of the screenshots above and will be sure to post here if I do so.

All the Best,

Ryan Schweighart

Whole Hart Impact, LLC

whimpact.co

I help organizations use HubSpot and Zapier.