Get to Know Usage Management
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- List the challenges of consumption-based products.
- Describe Usage Management.
- Explain how Usage Management fits within Revenue Cloud.
- Explore the benefits of Usage Management.
Before You Start
Before you start this module, make sure you complete this content. The work you do here builds on the concepts and work you do in that content.
Challenges of Consumption-Based Products
When you pay for things such as cloud storage or data usage, you usually pay only for what you use–no more, no less. Products like this are considered consumption-based products, where customers pay for exactly what they use.
Imagine your organization provides up to 100 GB of cloud storage per customer each month. One customer uses only 20 GB, while another exceeds that limit. To ensure fair pricing, you charge each customer based on their actual usage. That’s the essence of consumption-based products and services.
However, tracking, managing, and invoicing these products can be challenging. Sales, customer support, and billing teams often rely on time-consuming processes and disconnected systems.
For example, a mobile plan that offers unlimited data could require:
- Manual tracking: The billing team tracks each customer's data consumption through network reports.
- Customer notifications: Customer support sends alerts to customers as they approach their usage limit.
- Complex billing: The accounts department adds one-time charges to a customer’s monthly bill when the customer exceeds a usage limit and purchases a “top-up” plan. Manually adding these one-time charges to the customer's monthly bill is prone to error and can delay invoicing.
These disconnected solutions can lead to customer frustration and complicated, inefficient processes negatively impact revenue.
That’s where Revenue Cloud and Usage Management brings flexibility to your product offerings.
Meet Usage Management
Usage Management in Salesforce Revenue Cloud enables businesses define, measure, rate, and bill for consumption-based products with precision and clarity.
Whether you're offering cloud storage, software transactions, or digital downloads, Usage Management makes sure that:
- Customers access what they’ve paid for.
- Your business tracks and rates what customers consume.
- Your teams bill accurately and get clear visibility into entitlements.
You can easily define products, set usage policies, and implement your preferred rating logic. Usage Management includes a selling system designed specifically for consumption-based products, which is built right into the quote-to-order process. It then processes usage data into invoice-ready summaries for billing that reflect actual consumption. By simplifying the setup and automation of systems for consumption-based products, the app helps you design, sell, track, and invoice these offerings.
How Does Usage Management Fit Within Revenue Cloud?
Usage Management isn’t a standalone feature. It integrates seamlessly with Revenue Cloud’s core components, including Configure, Price, Quote (CPQ), Asset Management, and Billing. You can customize the entire consumption-based revenue cycle.
Here’s how Usage Management fits into Revenue Cloud.
Build on CPQ
Sales teams can select consumption-based products directly from the product catalog during quoting. The initial quote reflects product usage entitlement and applies the correct overage pricing. Usage Management provides the structure for these products, including usage grants, usage amounts, and overage rates.
You can adjust or negotiate rates for these products. This gives sales reps a clear starting point and helps them align offers with customer needs.
Automate Asset Management
When a customer purchases a consumption-based product, Revenue Cloud automatically creates an asset. Usage Management is directly tied to this asset, tracking its usage over time. It also creates a wallet, which acts as a live tracker for the customer’s usage, entitlements, and remaining balances. This helps your company manage the entire consumption-based product lifecycle, including rollovers, renewals, amendments, and cancellations.
The Usage Management data model provides the necessary objects and fields to set up and manage these products, with related records created upon order activation. This makes sure that pricing details are carried forward through orders and assets, and the wallets provide real-time visibility for both your teams and the customer.
Simplify Consumption and Billing
Usage Management ingests usage data from transaction journals. At the end of a billing cycle, it summarizes the customer’s total usage and calculates the overage charges based on predefined rate cards. It applies pricing logic to this usage data to determine actual consumption charges. It then passes the summarized rate information to the billing engine for invoicing.
By integrating with these core systems, Usage Management automates the entire consumption-based revenue cycle, from the initial quote to the final invoice.
Key Benefits of Usage Management
Businesses with consumption-based pricing stay competitive by offering flexible solutions that grow with customer needs. Industries such as telecom, finance, healthcare, software, and utilities all rely on custom solutions. Usage Management helps these businesses work more efficiently, sell more, and deliver a better customer experience. Here are some key benefits.
Benefit | Description |
|---|---|
Operational Efficiency | Usage Management automates tracking, summarization, and rating. This streamlines the quote-to-cash process, reduces the workload for finance teams, and speeds up invoicing. Built-in pricing rules are easy to update, keeping processes reliable and adaptable. |
Scalability | Built on the Salesforce Platform with an API-first approach, Usage Management offers robust scalability for growing businesses. It helps companies handle large volumes of usage data and an increasing number of consumption-based products without a decline in performance. Usage-Based Product Configuration lets you easily set up new products based on various consumption metrics such as data, minutes, or API calls, and scale these offerings as demand grows. |
Increased Revenue | By tracking and billing every unit of consumption, businesses capture revenue that could otherwise be lost due to manual errors or an inability to measure usage. Usage Management simplifies the implementation of overage charges. Sales reps use consumption tracking to forecast customer requirements and create quotes based on consumption patterns. |
Customer Transparency and Trust | Usage Management provides both businesses and customers with clear, near real-time visibility into usage data, fostering trust and reducing billing disputes. This makes sure customers are billed only for what they consume and can clearly see how their charges are calculated. |
Monetization Model Flexibility | Usage Management enables modern, flexible pricing models. Organizations can move beyond traditional one-time or subscription-only models and offer customers the ability to pay for what they use. This is essential for pay-as-you-go pricing and negotiating contracts with multi-tiered rate plans. |
In short, companies get more efficient, grow revenue, and build trust with customers.
In this unit, you learned how Usage Management helps businesses overcome the challenges of consumption-based products, and how it integrates into the core features of Revenue Cloud. In the next unit, you explore the components that make Usage Management so effective.