I'm a bit confused by the relationship between Deals, Products and Line-Items...
We have recurrent products which I need to incorporate in HubSpot as Deals.
What are the actual steps here? This is my naïve understanding:
Create deal with deals API
Create line-item with line item API
Associate line item to deal with CRM associations API
Will a new line item need to be created with each recurring payment, or does this happen automatically?
What do I do when a deal ends (user cancels plan)? For the deal, I would add an end-date, indicating the deal is over. What about the line item? Does the deal's end date affect the associated line item?
Note: you can select the price type as recurring charge.
Once that's done, you can grab the product ID by using this endpoint: Get all products.
Having the product ID, you can create a line item in which the parameter `hs_product_id` is pointing to the product ID (with the recurring charge).
Now that you've the line item created, you can associate it with the deal using the CRM Associations API.
To answer your question regarding when the deal closed, the association between the line item and the deal will still be there. You can still view the line item with the products on the deal record.
per: "To answer your question regarding when the deal closed, the association between the line item and the deal will still be there. You can still view the line item with the products on the deal record. "
In our case the deal is closed as soon as someone signs up. The issue is not the closed state, it's the "canceled state." I.e. the user cancels their plan (product), the recurrent payments therefore stop, and I need to flag the deal as "finished". The idea was to do this with deal end-date, as that would indicate that the revenue stream was ending. So the question remains: when a deal is "ended" (end-date reached), does the revenue still show in the system since there is a line item? If so, do I need to do anyhting with said line item when a deal reaches it's term?
When looking to report on forecasting, HubSpot will look at the deal amount and you can update the deal amount to reflect the product recurring value in your HubSpot app - Deal record > 'Edit products' > Summary: select e.g. 'Annually':
To your second question about tracking recurring revenue, you can manage recurring products in HubSpot by using the `Revenue Analysis` report where if a recurring revenue is inactive, you can set the reason to be Churned. You can learn more here: Track recurring revenue in HubSpot.
One thing to note here: The recurring revenue amount doesn't auto-populate the product recurring amount/deal amount. As such, you'd need to set this recurring revenue amount manually.
Hope this helps to shed some light. Let me know if there's any further questions on this 🙂
Hm. So to do recurrent revenue reporting, forecasting, etc. we need to have an enterperise plan? We're a pretty small start-up at this point, and enterprise is not feasible. How are other (non-enterprise) SasS customers managing recurrent plan-based products?
Are line items used to track multiple revenues for a deal? I.e. a deal is created, which represents a recurrent product (plan in our case), and a line item is created at the same time (linking the deal to the product.) Are additional line items added for each recurrent payment, all associated back to the same deal?
As for the second questions, a recurring product generates one product ID which is used when creating line item and this line item will be associated to a deal. As such, there wouldn't be additional line item added for each recurring payment as ultimately the line item is set by the product ID.
What's the situation with line-item and recurrent payments in terms of forecasting? Is a new line item created for each payment made, or doe the line item represent the product including it's recurrent nature?