Revenue Management: #6 Revenue Recognition in Professional Services Industry
If you run a consulting firm, agency, or any service-based business, you have a situation where you have signed the contract, maybe even sent the invoice, and have received some initial payments. So, can you consider this as revenue? What if the project spans several months? What if there is a revision or unplanned scope creep in?
How do service-based businesses recognize revenue for time, materials, and milestones?
Revenue Recognition Scenarios in the Professional Services
This can happen to any service-based firm, like legal advisors, consultants, marketing agencies, and IT services providers, as they don't sell physical goods. Instead, they provide time, expertise, and deliverables with different timelines. This means, the revenue is recognized as work is performed and not when the invoices are sent. Here are some of the common scenarios that a service-based company faces:
Time & Material Billing
Many firms work on time and material contracts, where billing is based on hours logged. In contrast, fixed-fee projects promise a set scope for a lump sum. Revenue must be recognized based on the work delivered, not simply how much time has passed or been billed.
Example: A consultant bills $150/hour. If 40 hours are worked in April, $6000 is recognized for that month.
Bundled Services
Like SaaS, A contract might include onboarding, implementation and support. Each has a different timeline and must be recognized separately. Without clear performance obligations, firms risk misstating their revenue.
Example: A network provider sells routers, installs them, and provides support for a one-year period for $50,000. Here, the revenue earned by routers is recognized immediately; revenue from installation will be recognized as and when it is done. However, the revenue for support will be recognised only at the end of the year.
Milestone-Based Deliverables
Some contracts are milestone-based. Even if the client pays upfront or monthly, revenue must be recognized only when the milestone is met. This leads to uneven revenue patterns and complex tracking.
Example: A $20,000 marketing strategy contract has different stages, starting with $500 for discovery, $10,000 for planning, and $5000 at the time of delivery. Revenue aligns with each milestone.
Different Start Date
There can be cases where the client pays upfront for a project that begins after a few weeks. The revenue cannot be considered recognized until the project begins, and it will be deferred until the actual start date.
Example: $10,000 was paid in June for a project that starts in August. The revenue will have to be maintained as a liability/deferred until August.
Scope Changes & Goes for Rework
Projects often evolve with new tasks, changes in timeline, or even the entire deliverable gets changed. These contract modifications require updated revenue allocation and potentially re-recognition of previously booked revenue.
Example: A legal advisory firm signs a six-month contract for $60,000. After two months, the clients expanded the scope by adding training and doubling the reviews from the earlier contract, which required reallocating revenue for the remaining months.
Since service delivery isn't always linear, tracking obligation completion is essential. Manually doing this for a large-scale contract is going to be close to impossible.
Scenario:
A digital consultancy service signs a contract for $60,000 with a client that includes $10,000 worth of an upfront discovery workshop. Additionally, System implementation is planned for $30,000 and will take three months to complete. Technical assistance will be offered at $20,000 for six months.
Zoho Billing for Professional Service Revenue Recognition
Zoho Billing allows professional services firms to configure revenue recognition rules tailored to the contract's stages and services.
For the scenario above, the rule could be set as follows:
| For Discovery Workshop | For Implementation | For Technical Assistance |
Recognition Frequency | Once | Monthly | Monthly |
Recognition Method | Daily | Evenly Distributed | Evenly Distributed |
Recognition Time | Period Start | Period Start | Period Start |
Once configured, Zoho Billing will take care of recognizing the revenue automatically.
It recognizes $10,000 after the discovery sessions are done. For implementation, $10,000 will be recognized per month for the next three months. For technical assistance, $3,333 per month will be recognized, which sums up to $20,000 for the committed six-month period.
Reports in Zoho Billing
If you look at the Revenue Recognition reports after two months in Zoho Billing, you can find,
i) Recognized Revenue Report
Two months into the engagement, the discovery workshop is over, two months of implementation have been delivered, and two months of technical assistance have been rendered.
Component | Recognized Revenue | Description |
Discovery Workshop | $10,000 | Fully recognized |
System Implementation | $20,000 | $10,000/month for two months |
Technical Assistance | $6666 | $3333/month for two months |
Total Recognized | $36,666 | Revenue earned in two months |
ii) Deferred Revenue Report
The remaining revenue in deferred is for pending implementation and assistance services that are to be done.
Component | Deferred Amount |
System Implementation | $10,000 (one month left) |
Technical Assistance | $13,334 ($3333/month x4) |
Total Deferred | $23,334 |
iii) Revenue Waterfall Report
Month | Discovery Workshop | Implementation | Assistance | Total |
Month 1 | $10,000 | $10,000 | $3,333 | $23,333 |
Month 2 | --- | $10,000 | $3,333 | $13,333 |
Month 3 (upcoming) | --- | $10,000 | $3,333 | $13,333 |
Month 4 (upcoming) | --- | --- | $3,333 | $3,333 |
Month 5 (upcoming) | --- | --- | $3,333 | $3,333 |
Month 6 (upcoming) | --- | --- | $3,333 | $3,333 |
Best Practice for Professional Services Revenue Recognition
- Define Deliverables Clearly: Break work into explicit deliverables/obligations to know how it will be delivered.
- Match Revenue with Service Period: Use time-based or milestone-based rules depending on the service to be recognized.
- Reassess on Scope Changes: The system should be equipped to automatically understand contract changes and recognize scheduled changes when the project terms shift.
- Manual Revenue Recognition: It is best to use Manual Revenue Recognition based on completion for long-term milestone-based projects.
Topic Participants
Hari Hara Sudhan. S
Sticky Posts
Community Learning Series | Digest #5 — September 2020
Dear customers, We're happy to bring you the September edition of our #CommunityDigest! Keep track of your subscription KPIs right from your smartphone: Last month, we enhanced our Android mobile app to help our customers get daily updates on their business health. We got to know from a lot of customers that this has made their job much more easier because they no longer have to keep a reminder to manually check on the previous day's revenue or activations. If you have not downloaded it yet, here'sCommunity Learning Series | Digest #4 - August 2020
Dear customers, We hope you're staying safe and healthy. I'm happy to bring you the fourth edition of our #CommunityDigest with some brand-new updates from us. 1. Daily Business Updates (for Android users) The Zoho Subscriptions Android app has got a cool new update: You can now get a push notification to your smartphone that lets you know how many activations and cancellations have taken place, and what's the net revenue for the previous day. The best part is, you can tell the app when exactly youCommunity Learning Series | Digest #3 - July 2020
Dear customers, We hope you're staying safe and healthy. We're glad to bring you the July edition of our #CommunityDigest. New community members can view our previous newsletters here. This time, we have two major updates and three interesting topics for you: 1. Zoho Subscriptions Developer Community Since the inception of Zoho Subscriptions, our team believed that the recurring billing platform we provide should be able to offer an extensive API library that empowers businesses to automate mostIntroducing: Community Learning Series | Digest #1 - May 2020
Dear customers, We hope you are staying safe and healthy. Helping businesses manage their customer subscriptions more efficiently has always been, and always will be, our goal at Zoho Subscriptions. We strongly believe this is possible if we grow together as a community and share what we know with each other. To nurture this shared learning experience, here is our brand-new Community Learning Series! Welcome to the first edition of our digest! Each edition of our community digest includes guides
Recent Topics
Subform auto populate values
Hi Team, I’m trying to retrieve values from Zoho People using API functions and dynamically populate them into a subform. For example, I’ve created a form with several fields that users will fill out. Based on their input, I need to fetch records fromReupload and rename from one field to another field (file upload)
Hi Everyone, Sorry, i have question to use invoke url for rename and reupload attachments file to another field. Tested on development mode. Zoho C6. Refer to https://www.zoho.com/creator/help/api/v2/upload-file.html look my error notification. Does anyoneAssign multiple departments to multiple helpcenters
Hi there! I have a reseller company for a software and I'm using Zoho Desk as my helpcenter and ticket management system. The software is great and I would like to make a suggestion! With multi-branding activated, your departments that visible in helpZoho Desk Training
Hello, We've had Zoho desk for a while now, but we run into issues occasionally, and I was wondering if there was a customer who currently uses it and really enjoys the functionality, that would be wiling to chat with us?Tips for Organizing Workflows and Improving Team Coordination in Zoho
Hi everyone, I’m looking for some general advice on how different teams are organizing their daily work within Zoho’s apps. Our team recently expanded, and we’re trying to streamline how tasks, discussions, and documents are shared so everything staysBatch/lot # and Storage bin location
Hi I want to ask for a feature on Zoho inventory I own a warehouse and I've gone through different management software solutions with no luck until I found Zoho, it has been a game changer for my business with up to the minute information, I'm extremely happy with it. It's almost perfect. And I say Almost because the only thing missing for me (and I'm sure I'm not alone) is the need of being able to identify the lot number of my inventory and where it is located in the warehouse. Due to the naturePrevent user from viewing all records?
I have a report that is meant to be used by vendors to view only the records that are assigned to them. All the vendor information is stored in a separate application, so I need to call a function to get the current user's ID (not the zoho user ID). The report settings criteria doesn't support using function calls, so instead I'm embedding the report in an html page like this: if (thisapp.Global.CurrentUserIs("Vendor")) { personID = common.getLoggedInPersonID(); query = "Assigned_Vendor.ID="Series Label in the Legend
My legend reads 'Series 1' and 'Series 2'. From everything I read online, Zoho is supposed to change the data names if it's formatted correctly. I have the proper labels on the top of the columns and the right range selected. I assume it's something inZoho Site pages not displaying in iframes
I simply want to show a Zoho Site page inside an iframe on another non Zoho website. When testing this across many browsers, the iframe content simply does not appear. IE reports that the host does not allow their content to be displayed in iframes. Very disappointing. Is there a way around this please? Here is the URL of the page I would like to appear in an iframe. http://ips-properties-to-rent.zohosites.comIssue with Creator's IF logic
Hi, I found the following code produces unexpected results: if(-1.0 < 0.0000000) { info "True"; } else { info "False"; } if(-1.0 < 0.000000) { info "True"; } else { info "False"; } The output returned is: False True However, theZoho Inventory as connector in Zoho Creator
Hello, It doesn't appear that Zoho Inventory is one of the many built in connectors in Zoho Creator? I see that there are non-Zoho inventory applications that have built in connectors such as Cin7, which leads me to believe that I'm missing somethingSend Zoho Forms Link using Zoho CRM Email Templates
I have set up Zoho Forms and CRM integration to pre-populate data from Zoho CRM to Zoho Forms. The setup is working fine. I have also created an email template in the Zoho CRM deals module to send Zoho forms links. So when I send an email using that templateCan I execute two 'functions' when completing a mail merge from CRM?
Hi, I have set up a mail merge from CRM Deals to a template. I want a copy of this to be saved in Workdrive, and then a copy also saved back into the deal record from which the merge occurred. I can do both independent of each other, and managed to getMy go to On Load Client Script - Fast, efficient, and works for ALL profiles; Hides everything except initial fields
This is my on Load client script that I use for Create pages. I use a modified version for Edit and Display pages which you can create yourself using the same basic structure that I will give you below. First up, the script. Below that will be an explanationCRM x WorkDrive: File storage for new CRM signups is now powered by WorkDrive
Availability Editions: All DCs: All Release plan: Released for new signups in all DCs. It will be enabled for existing users in a phased manner in the upcoming months. Help documentation: Documents in Zoho CRM Manage folders in Documents tab Manage filesZoho Books Finance Modules Not Accessible in Zoho CRM Mobile App
We have integrated Zoho CRM with Zoho Books using the Zoho Finance Suite integration. In the CRM web version, we can see the Finance modules (Estimates/Quotes, Invoices, Sales Orders, Items, Payments) and are able to create invoices and quotes directlyCustom Search using HTM+CSS Snippet
Suppose I wanted to create my own list view using HTML and CSS snippets inside a Page with a custom search input at the top of the list (not the Search snippet). Without Javascript, is there a way to retrieve a user's entry from that search input andCliq iOS can't see shared screen
Hello, I had this morning a video call with a colleague. She is using Cliq Desktop MacOS and wanted to share her screen with me. I'm on iPad. I noticed, while she shared her screen, I could only see her video, but not the shared screen... Does Cliq iOS is able to display shared screen, or is it somewhere else to be found ? RegardsMass Update of Lookup Fields not possible
Hello List I've created a custom field for Leads and Contacts 'Current Campaign'. This is very Handy as I can filter leads and then related them to a campaign. Everything ready, but then I realized that mass update doesn't work for lookup fields... aZoho CRM Kiosk Upload Files
Hello all, We are trying out Kiosks at the moment to see where it can fit best in our business. We are still a bit off in the application but lets say we will sort this out. My question is the following - when I create a Kiosk I can add "File Upload"Double opt-in notifications and customizable confirmation messages for your webforms
Dear CRM Community, We are excited to announce a major upgrade to our Webforms feature. You can now customize the confirmation message shown to your users who double opt-in from your webform and also customize your confirmation emails when they submitHas Anyone successfully integrated Zoho and Sage Intact?
Hey all, We’re evaluating Zoho One + Sage Intacct and I’m trying to connect with anyone who has actually implemented the two together.Specifically, I’d love to know: -- Which functions you kept in Zoho vs. Intacct (e.g., Product Catalog, AR/AP, invoicing,Introducing Image Upload Field
Hello everyone, In this post we will discuss about the benefits and usage of the Image upload field. The field is available for standard and custom modules. Usage: This field can be used to upload a gallery of images to a record and share the record with peers or customers. The record can be made accessible to users outside of Zoho CRM via Portals, where they can upload the necessary images. Preview, editing, and deleting images: The uploaded images can be directly edited and saved from the recordTrigger a Workflow Function if an Attachment (Related List) has been added
Hello, I have a Case Module with a related list which is Attachment. I want to trigger a workflow if I added an attachment. I've seen some topics about this in zoho community that was posted few months ago and based on the answers, there is no triggerFree webinar alert on November 19 - Email driven strategies - Master personality based styles
Hello Zoho Community! Want to make email management easier, smarter, and more you? We’ve got just the session for you! Join our interactive, game-based webinar to discover how Zoho Mail adapts to your personality and work style. Learn practical hacks,Associate emails from both primary and secondary contacts to deal
We need to associate emails from multiple contacts to a deal. Please advise how this can be achieved. At present, only emails from primary contacts can be associated. ThanksSubform edits don't appear in parent record timeline?
Is it possible to have subform edits (like add row/delete row) appear in the Timeline for parent records? A user can edit a record, only edit the subform, and it doesn't appear in the timeline. Is there a workaround or way that we can show when a userAI generated meeting notes associated to Account or Deal
As our organization works to improve efficiency we are looking for a solution to leverage AI to generate meeting notes and then add those notes to a CRM record such as an Account or Deal. I see Zoho has a Notebook AI offering that talks about the abilitydue date on cheue
how to handle cheque in zoho books for customers and vendors including due dateZoho CRM Portal Field Level Permission Issue
Hi Support Team, I am using the Zoho CRM Portal and configuring field-level editing permissions. However, we are unable to restrict portal users from editing certain fields. We have created a portal and provided View and Edit (Shared Only) access forWebDAV / FTP / SFTP protocols for syncing
I believe the Zoho for Desktop app is built using a proprietary protocol. For the growing number of people using services such as odrive to sync multiple accounts from various providers (Google, Dropbox, Box, OneDrive, etc.) it would be really helpful if you implemented standard protocols such as WebDAV / FTP / SFTP so that alternative inc clients can be used.Different MRP / Pricing for same product but different batches
We often face the following situations where MRP of a particular product changes on every purchase and hence we have to charge the customer accordingly. This can't be solved by Batch tracking as of now so far as I understand Zoho. How do you manage it as of now?'Statement of Accounts does not exist' error received, when creating PO using api in Zoho Inventory
Here is request json -- JSONString = { "date": "2019-09-24", "purchaseorder_number": "PO-6-1", "delivery_date": null, "delivery_org_address_id": 36221200000056XXX, "vendor_id": 362212000000564XXX, "attention": "Testing", "line_items": [{ "unit": "Pieces", "account_id": 36221200000003XXX, "quantity": 1, "item_id": 362212000000049XXX, "tax_type": "", "tax_name": "", "name": "One HD", "purchase_rate": 85, "tax_percentage": 0, "item_total": 85.00, "tax_id": "", "warehouse_id": 362212000000564XXX }] }Zoho Projects API 100 requests/2 min. Limit
Hi Requesting clarification on the API documentation. "You can invoke or call an API for 100 times in a span of two minutes. If you invoke more than 100 times, the particular API request will be locked for the next 30 minutes. " Does this limit applyUnveiling Zoho Sites 2.0 - A new dimension in website building
Dear Zoho Sites Users, We are thrilled to announce the launch of Zoho Sites 2.0 today! This refresh represents a significant step forward in the capabilities of Zoho Sites and is crucial for creating a lasting and positive impact on our customers' businesses.Integrate your Outlook/ Office 365 inbox with Zoho CRM via Graph API
Hello folks, In addition to the existing IMAP and POP options, you can now integrate your Outlook/Office 365 inbox with Zoho CRM via Graph API. Why did we add this option? Microsoft Graph API offers a single endpoint to access data from across Microsoft’sPO Based Advance payment to Vendor
We recommend to introduce a provision at PO to make advance payment to vendors and auto apply that advance paid later at the time of Vendor Bill submission for that PO. This will help us track PO-wise Total Payments.Zoho Projects - Attachments added to Task and Bug emails are not saved
Hi Projects team, I have been experimenting with emails into projects to create tasks and bugs. I have noticed that attachments added to the emails are not saved to the task or bug. Is this normal behaviour? Thanks, AshleyZoho Inventory's latest shipping integration updates at a glance.
Hello Users, We would like to share some important news about our latest improvements in the Shipping integration capabilities of Zoho Inventory that we achieved in 2024 with some of our major integration partners in key editions across APAC, North America,How we cut CRM updates from ~20 minutes down to 2, our real workflow
Updating the Zoho CRM after every call used to be one of the biggest time sucks for our team. By the time you write your notes, clean them up, fill in the fields, and log everything properly… you’ve easily lost 15–20 minutes per call. We started experimentingNext Page