Ability to edit Subscription Name / Number

[benj]

Subscription Name shouldn't be used as an ID number. A subscription that changes over time will always have the same name no matter what products etc are added to it. It's hard to come up with a meaningful subscription name in this instance, instead you have to come up with something very generic. We should be able to modify this existing subscription name or number.

[nathanc]

 It is possbile to change the default value of the Subscription Name to either the Oppty Name, the Quote Name or the Auto generated Sub Number from Zuora....and of course the Oppty Name or Quote Name can be any logic you like.

Do either of those options work for you?  

[benj]

Hi Nathan,

We currently use the opportunity name. The problem is that the subscription name cannot be modified as it's being used as a unique identifier. We should really have an auto generated number from Zuora as being the unique identifier and the name of the subscription as simply being a text field that can be edited as needed. 

The issue happens when we create a new subscription and then later amend, we would want to have something like the following:

Opportunity 1 -> New Subscription, Opportunity Name: "Company A - Web Product"

12 months later renewal and upsell new product

Opportunity 2 -> Renewal Subscription, Opportunity Name: "Company A - Web Product, Intelligence Product"

Currently, the subscription name cannot be amended even after an amendment. The only solution we have is to provide very generic subscription names. This doesn't work for us as we operate under a multiple subscription model and we want to be able to easily identify which subscriptions contain which products.

[feisley]

@benj My suggestion here would be to keep the auto generated subscription number as is for the globally unique identifier. You can then create a custom field on the subscription to store your specific version of the subscription name and that can be updated when amendments are performed.

[benj]

@feisley thanks, that's one workaround and would help our Salesforce users in being able to identify subscriptions at a glance but it wouldn't help us in the Zuora UI. The following is what we see for one of our customers and as far as I'm aware we can't modify the UI. In this instance, we end up wasting a lot of time manually checking each subscription.

[feisley]

@benj that is true, especially if you view subscriptions from the "Subscriptions" menu. However, if you go to a specific customer, the list of subscriptions includes the 'List Of Products' column includes the products now or previously on the subscription, which might help.

Another thing we have done to expedite things is customize the views from within Salesforce. This is used not only by our sales team but also our billing and operations team. So its easy to see custom fields on the subscriptions that show the rollup of products or other key details. Then we made a custom button on the subscription object in Salesforce called 'View in Zuora' that links them right to the object in the Zuora UI in case they need to perform back office changes to it. In this way the Salesforce UI serves as our highly customizeable front end and can deep link back to Zuora for administrative work.

We also made "View in Zuora" buttons for most other Salesforce objects such as Billing Accounts, Invoices, Payments, etc...

[benj]

 @feisley I think one of the issues with the list of products from the UI is as you've said it doesn't contain the current list of products but rather all products from every amendment so it can still be somewhat confusing.

That being said I really like the idea of using Salesforce as the go-to and creating a View in Zuora custom button for Zuora users to make changes on the backend more easily. Presumably you did this by grabbing the Zuora Id from the SF object and appending it to the appropriate Zuora Url for that object? Really great idea, I like this a lot and will certainly help our back office teams.

Thanks a bunch! Not quite what I was looking for but will certainly help! 

[feisley]

@benj Correct, I just use the Zuora ID to build the URL to open the new window to the Zuora UI. Here is the example for Subscription.

For some objects like Invoice the URL uses the invoice number rather than the 32 character internal ID, so just browse to an object in the Zuora UI to see how to build the URL.