Whether you’re doing this alone or in collaboration with a partner, here are some important steps to follow to successfully migrate from Revenue Recognition to Subscription Billing.
Revenue recognition is a generally accepted accounting principle (GAAP) referring to how you recognize revenue. This process varies from company to company, but is crucial to a company’s financial health, especially when it comes to identifying when to recognize revenue immediately, when to defer revenue, and when to recognize deferred revenue. For companies in industries that sell multiple elements, such as products, services, and subscriptions, it is important to be able to isolate each element and then recognize the revenue from each.
The Revenue Recognition module in Dynamics 365 Finance has been a useful tool for accomplishing this, enabling companies to allocate and defer revenue based on their own company-specific and industry-specific guidelines. With Microsoft deprecating the Revenue Recognition module, many users are faced with the task of migrating to Subscription Billing. Any kind of migration demands a deliberate approach, with careful steps to mitigate risk and reduce downtime.
Whether you’re doing this alone or in collaboration with a partner, here are some important steps to follow to successfully migrate from Revenue Recognition to Subscription Billing.
1. Discovery and analysis
2. Project planning and scoping
3. Utility configuration and object mapping
4. Trial migration validation and testing
5. Training and advisory services
We’ll take a closer look at these steps shortly, but first, let’s consider some factors to consider when attempting to migrate from Revenue Recognition to Subscription Billing.
Moving from one solution presents many challenges, one of which is risk, especially where your data is concerned. When deciding how you want to migrate, or who to partner with, pay attention to experience and expertise that can guarantee you a process with lower risk.
Dealing with downtime when migrating from one solution to another is inevitable. However, the right approach can help you keep your downtime to a minimum. A manual migration will take much more time and is more prone to errors. With a partner offering a configurable migration utility, you’ll move much quicker, reducing the amount of time your Dynamics Finance environment will be down.
By utilizing a partner that has experience in migrating from Revenue Recognition to Subscription Billing you will have much more efficient migration. This will reduce the cost of the migration and reduce the manhours spent by your team migrating. In addition, the migration period is a good time to identify areas of potential business improvement. Working with the right team, you can also analyze if your company can benefit from the recurring contract billing capabilities provided by Subscription Billing, which can improve efficiency and eliminate unnecessary costs.
This initial stage should focus on understanding your business requirements. How have you been using Revenue Recognition? How do you intend to use Subscription Billing? The goal should be to gain a robust perspective on your specific deferral use cases. In addition, you should seek to identify any uses you have for Revenue Recognition not covered by Subscription Billing and how to make up for those functionality gaps.
With sufficient background from the previous step, work with your partners to come up with a detailed plan for the project. The goal here should be to ensure everyone is prepared and that the project follows a timeline that makes sense for your business.
Here, your technical team and your partners should collaborate to ensure that the migration utility is properly configured and mapped to your system. This helps ensure smooth migration of your data during the actual event.
Before disabling Revenue Recognition and enabling Subscription billing, you want to ensure everything will work right. A trial stage helps to identify any potential issues or blockers, solve them beforehand, and ensure that the final migration is successful.
Here, ensure that your team is fully trained on how to replicate any previous Revenue Recognition processes in Subscription Billing. In addition, this period when moving from one solution to another is a great opportunity to make necessary changes in your processes—so work with your partners to identify any opportunities for business process improvements.
