SaaS businesses need CPQ with multi-entity. You might not need it today if you’re still relatively small, but as soon as you start growing into different geographies or preparing to do an M&A, you’re going to need the ability to manage all of your entities within one instance for greater efficiency, visibility, and governance.
With Subskribe Multi-Entity for Subskribe CPQ, the first-ever standalone CPQ with built-in multi-entity, SaaS businesses can now seamlessly manage all of their entities.
Multi-Entity vs. Single Entity
When you have more than one entity, business unit, or regional office, managing CPQ gets exponentially harder. You might have different legal product names, product offerings within each entity, varying pricing and packaging, different discounts, different currencies, different sales teams, different rules of governance, different approval policies, or different contract documents. In other words … it’s a lot to manage.
Across these entities, you need two things:
- Clear operational segregation. Each entity must be able to operate in its own silo with visibility into just its own entity, rather than having a global view of the business. For example, limiting the view of your North American sales team so they don’t have access to — or get confused by — the different offerings you have in EMEA.
- Consolidated view. High-level access for admins and upper management that cuts across all the entities for one consolidated view, allowing for full visibility and comprehensive reporting.
Subskribe Multi-Entity provides both and enables you to easily define structure so when you’re selling from one entity, the system generates the structure, terms, and documentation for that particular entity.
Shared Objects vs. Isolated Transactions
At the core of our Multi-Entity are shared objects and isolated transactions. We use these terms to define different functionality and describe the built-in levels of control you have over things like users and payments across multiple entities.
Shared objects are objects that more than one entity can use. For example, you may have a product catalog that is the same across your U.S. and Canada businesses. Rather than having to duplicate the product catalog for both entities, with Multi-Entity, you can just share them across entities. Shared objects include users, accounts, product catalogs, approval rules, discounts, terms and conditions, and order form templates.
Isolated transactions are actions that have to be tagged to one entity. For example, you create one invoice transaction. Isolated transactions include orders, subscriptions, invoices, payments, credits, revenue schedules, and journal entries. All of these transactions belong to one entity, which is reflected in the accounting for that company. For this reason, we’ve built in restrictions so that each of these isolated transactions exists solely within its own entity.
Let’s use a real-life example to illustrate: Netflix offers you a credit on your U.S. account. If you move to another region, the pricing and credit rules might be different in that entity. Because of this, you won’t be able to use that credit in the new region because a credit is isolated. The control is built into the tool.
What can you do with Subskribe Multi-Entity?
Subskribe Multi-Entity solves for a number of challenges. Here are just a few ways you can save time and increase accuracy and control with Subskribe Multi-Entity:
Single login. Seems simple, but many SaaS solutions still require different logins to manage multi-entity. Let’s imagine you need to enter a GL code. Without single login, you’d have to log in to each different instance to take that action. Multiply this by the number of instances you have, and this quickly becomes a nuisance. Subskribe Multi-Entity supports single login.
Managing accounts across entities. If you’re selling to three different people in the same account but in different regions, rather than having to create three different account records in three different places and then managing and consolidating and updating all of them, you can just manage a single account across entities.
Streamline additions and updates. With Subskribe Multi-Entity, you can tag shared objects for one, many, or all entities. So, for example, you can build your product catalog and then tag it in the France and Germany entities, but not in Canada. You don’t have to recreate it in each instance; you just create it once, tag it appropriately, and you’re good to go. And any subsequent change you make to your product catalog will apply across all tagged entities.
Flexible reporting. With Subskribe Multi-Entity, you get all the data from across all entities so you can mix and match and cut the data however you need — to report individually or for consolidated reporting. So no more logging into different systems to extract different reports and then stitching them together to produce a single report for execs, investors, or your board.
What are the core benefits of Multi-Entity?
To be clear, the benefits of Multi-Entity are numerous — and cumulative. But here are just a few of the top benefits:
Controlled visibility. With Subskribe Multi-Entity you have the flexibility to assign visibility to users at a granular level so everyone has just the view they need — so an account exec will only have visibility into the region she sells whereas a regional sales leader can have visibility into multiple regions for a cross-region view, and your CFO has access to every entity for full visibility.
Efficiency. CPQ management without Multi-Entity is cumbersome — requiring lots of additional admin and manual work to recreate and duplicate updates across all instances for each individual entity.
Governance. Because Subskribe Multi-Entity gives you the ability to control access, it’s an important tool in terms of segregation of duties and access. Limiting access so that everyone has access to what they need — but nothing else — is important from a governance standpoint.
Compliance. Based on your location, you can have different requirements for compliance. For example, in one region, maybe both the buyer and seller need to sign contract agreements, but in another region, only the customer signs. You can easily manage and maintain all of these local needs and governance in one unified system.
Consistent experience. Subskribe Multi-Entity creates a much more consistent cross-functional experience — with everyone from sales to legal to customer support to finance all logging into one system.
Scalability. Multi-Entity is an enterprise feature that’s essential for growing SaaS businesses. If your business is doing a lot of M&A, Multi-Entity is a particularly great tool that will expedite consolidations and make the onboarding process much more efficient.
The Subskribe Multi-Entity Difference
There are some companies that offer multi-entity on the billing side, but Subskribe is the only standalone CPQ with multi-entity. This isn’t custom code. Subskribe Multi-Entity is a purpose-built feature designed to make it easier for SaaS businesses to grow.
Take this one simple construct: within Subskribe Multi-Entity, every tenant now defaults to multi-entity. In other words, you don’t need to do anything special to get started. You start with your default entity and then can easily create multi-entities as needed.
Whether you have one CRM (more common with organic growth) or multiple CRMs (more common with growth through acquisition), you can still use Subskribe Multi-Entity.
Subskribe Multi-Entity for Growing SaaS businesses
You may not have multiple entities yet, but you likely will in the future. And, when you do, Subskribe Multi-Entity will work for you because it’s supported right out of the box.
We have customers operating in five different geographies with five different entities. And we have customers who keep acquiring companies every quarter, like clockwork. No matter the scale, Subskribe Multi-Entity can support your business.
Multi-Entity is a feature with SMB-to-enterprise functionality — and just another example of how we support SaaS businesses across the maturity model. As you grow from SMB to enterprise, we’re innovating alongside you to provide the products and features you need.
Book a meeting to learn more about Subskribe Multi-Entity and see it in action.
