Salesforce CPQ for managing invoicing process

Absolutely delightful - I fully recommend it.

Pros

Salesforce CPQ is absolutely fantastic software to manage the whole invoicing process. The time spent on the invoices management has gone down drastically when using Salesforce CPQ and it is very easy to use. It is used in order to automate Billing and Invoicing, Recurring Payments, Discounts and Order Management. I recommend it to anyone working at the company with complicated invoicing processes. Also the documentation and courses in Trailhead are great!

Cons

The configuration might be quite hard at times, but it is rather because of the fact that the businesses processes are very complex and they are hard to model.

Better for Simpler Pricing Modules

Overall its easy to maintain and allows for native SF features which makes it a great add on for customers already using Sales Cloud.

Pros

Since this is obviously an SF platform- the ease of implementation is great as well as the fact that there is not a huge learning curve- it operates just as other SF objects.

Cons

It can be very complicated to implement a pricing structure if you do not have a "simple" pricing module. We have tried 3 separate times (& used certified experts and contractors) to try and implement our pricing module and it did not work- I will say our pricing structure is much more complicated than it should be but its still been a huge issue.

CPQ requires a lot of clicks and is far from intuitive

It streamlines approvals somewhat, and makes for a more standardized quoting system, so I understand the business reasons for switching to it, but from an end user perspective, it has been a huge pain to use.

Pros

The thing I like the most about CPQ is that it allows me to keep multiple quotes attached to one opportunity a lot easier. There are also some great ways to add multiple products and makes that aspect of quoting easier.

Cons

CPQ was recently introduced at my org and it is so cumbersome to work through. It requires a lot of clicks and updating price/making price changes is very difficult. Creating a quote used to take me about 5 minutes and now it takes about 20 depending on the complexity. Maybe I'll get used to it and more familiarized, but it definitely isn't intuitive or efficient.

Huge feature set with multi-level deployment options - takes some getting use too

Large scale tracking of employee, customer and device information to include maintenance and tasking necessities. Generates an integrated DB option that allows for global tracking, management and metric options with a broad reporting feature.

Pros

The broad scope capabilities of Salesforce allow for a multi-departmental integration and deployment functionality with multi-scope database options. Integration with third-party systems is phenomenal, and the allowance of homegrown development is almost limitless when designing to the needs of your organization. Speed of deployment and development is only mitigated by internal knowledge but a large knowledge base and user set globally assist in speed of change.

Cons

Despite the large scale integration options with salesforce there can be a slowed user capability due to functional UI. This can of course be customized to meet the needs of your internal customers, but still requires considerable training to the tools available. Ensuring internal department integration and assistance will speed an organization to use.

Steelbrick is Promising

We looked at a few CPQ tools to help us automate a few obstacles in our (complicated) SaaS model. Steelbrick was the best solution out there for your buck. Pros: We were in a situation where our current (custom) CPQ solution did not allow the flexibility to add new products, adjust order forms, support local currencies (without an expensive developer resource) and it really empowered out business to address new opportunities by being able to do these things. There are a lot of objects and we needed to use them all to make our multi-year product model work and it seemed daunting, but really, I was able to pick up how everything fit together after a few days of diving in and playing around. The support and customer service team are absolutely amazing. Special shoutout to my CSM (Kelly Wilson) who responds day and night to emails and is always willing to find time to get on a call. Our primary support agent (ChrisL) is also really smart and easy to work with. No implementation of CPQ goes perfect, but we had great implementation engineer (ChrisT) and implementation consultant (ChrisH) who really PARTNERED with us to make sure the tool was what we needed to accomplish our goals. You can trust the product management team. We have already seen features that they have promised to us (contract amendments, for example). Cons: - We did not realize this until after implementation (and product management has promised us that it is a high priority), but the CPQ tool will only work in full data replica sandboxes. Partial and dev sandboxes do not bring over the 20+ object records that come with Steelbrick. You will need to make sure you also consider some data migration solution between environments. You can do this yourself. I did it once successfully and it took 4 hours. :( - CPU timeout errors. If you have complicated pricing on multi-year products and you make changes to those quotes (for example changing a 5 year deal to a 3 year deal), we often get a "CPU timeout" error. We can't ever get beyond this. We need to build a new quote. :( Again, Steelbrick product management has assured us that this will be addressed in future releases with more precise code.