If you’ve been introduced to the world of Salesforce, you might have heard of a little thing called a superbadge. Essentially, a superbadge is a digital expression of your expertise in certain fields of Salesforce Stack Exchange. Superbadges are specifically made to reflect real-world, hands-on challenges, and prepare you to use your skills for clients and businesses requiring unique and complicated solutions. Not to mention, Superbadges are an excellent practice for earning your Certification in Salesforce foundational knowledge.
Today, we’ll be sharing the expert take on the Billing Superbadge, a creative and curated way that Salesforce guides your learning into the use of billing objects within an org. The path to earning your Billing Specialist Superbadge isn’t always straightforward but here we break it down to make the process more fluid.
Understand The Order
“CPQ Is A Lot Like Making Coffee…” – Trailhead Baby
Knowing how CPQ uses and creates quotes, products, contracts and amendments will assist your journey in completing the Billing Superbadge. It touches upon some of those objects and user processes when it asks you to work with the opportunity, quote, order, order products, and contract. And once you understand the proper order of everything, it’s not difficult.
Set Up Tax Information
“Taxes? Why did there have to be something about taxes?” – Trailhead Baby
Tax setup is required in the Superbadge to correctly apply tax to Order Products in preparation for Invoicing. Since the Superbadge is rather vague regarding setup, here’s a short guide, you’ll need:
- A Tax Rule
- A Tax Integration
- A Tax Rate
- A Tax Treatment.
Added tip: Don’t forget to fill in the Legal Entity, and remember, the “Tax Code” number is crucial.
Complete Global Picklist Sets
“A global picklist set is always better when you want to use the values more than once.” – Trailhead Baby
Global Picklist sets are ideal for when you have twin fields which are multiple fields on different objects that need the same information. Or, when required to use the values more than once.
Using a global picklist ensures that data collected from these fields will all be matching and accurate. For the Billing Superbadge, global picklists will be needed to complete the challenges, so be aware.
Prepare for Step 15
“I usually just click around on the quiz until I pass. Doesn’t everyone?” – Trailhead Baby
Step 15, in particular, is the biggest challenge of the Billing Superbadge, and hopefully by the time you get to it, you’ve already been applying the necessary implementation in all prior steps.
Here are some pointers that should ease the road and help guide you through the monstrous step 15:
- Be sure to add the correct products and quantities to your quote, and that no products have odd pricing (i.e. subscription instead of list).
- When testing, make sure you have two split orders created before moving forward (your process builder should help with this).
- Add all relevant tax information to each of the four order products.
- Usage Summaries should automatically be made for your SolarBots product. When adding the Usage Records for both Microns and Requests, be sure they are on the correct corresponding Usage Summaries (hint: the dates should help you find the right ones).
- The Usage Record is used to supply information for the two usage products in this exercise (Microns and Requests) and must be filled in manually. Be sure to use Matching ID and correct quantities as stated in the instructions.
- Use your Provisioning Complete date field to activate and contract your orders. Your process builder should take care of this once you enter in a date.
- You can create invoices using the Bill Now checkbox on the Order.
- When allocating payments, be sure you allocate to each invoice line, and not the invoice total itself. The challenge will only look for payments against lines.
Turn Off Apex Triggers
“Triggers can be your best friend, and your worst enemy, all at the same time!” – Trailhead Baby
Apex triggers allow you to perform custom actions, such as insertions, updates, or deletions before or after events to record in Salesforce. You can use triggers for certain actions that can’t be completed with the point-and-click tools in the Salesforce interface.
But at other times, triggers can be a real headache! In the process of earning your Billing Superbadge in particular, we recommend trying to turn off triggers in CPQ and Billing if you find yourself stuck.
Take Advantage of the Expertise of Others
Between mastering CPQ and earning superbadges, Salesforce is a never-ending and complex universe in which an extra hand may be just what you need to ensure your success! Relying on experts in the field, like ITequality, is a great way to expand your knowledge about the platform. Their team of certified experts serves to provide diverse solutions to assist you with any of your Salesforce ventures.
Whether you’re just beginning to learn the in’s and out’s of Salesforce CPQ, or are working towards earning your next superbadge, ITequality is one of the most effective training resources out there. Unlike many Salesforce consulting companies, their priority is to teach you how to teach yourself so that you can take command of your own Salesforce journey, one goal at a time.
