Revenue Management: #4 What if there are uncertainties in project or service delivery?
Our previous post taught us how Zoho Billing makes life easy for businesses with its automated revenue recognition rule. However, certain businesses have more challenges that an automated system cannot handle, and there are certain situations where automated revenue recognition is not feasible. For example, construction services paid in advance but with uncertain start dates can make the revenue recognition rule look inappropriate. Some manual interventions are needed to handle this scenario.
Manual revenue recognition in Zoho Billing helps you handle these uncertainties. It is used when the timing and amount of revenue cannot be determined accurately through automated rules. This is common in industries such as construction, where project completion is tied to milestones that may occur at irregular intervals.
Example 1:
Imagine a construction firm signs a $50,000 contract to renovate a commercial building. The client pays the entire amount upfront, but the agreement specifies that the revenue will be recognized only as key project stages are completed. Each milestone carries a defined value or percentage of the total contact, say,
Design & Approval Phase: $5000
Demolition & Site Preparation: 30% of the total contract value
Structural & Roofing Work: 40% of the total contract value
Interiors & Handover: 100% of the remaining
Milestone | Recognition | Completion Date | Amount Recognized |
Design & Approval | Fixed Cost | 12/Jan/2025 | $5000 |
Demolition & Site Preparation | 30% of the total contract | 20/Feb/2025 | $15,000 |
Structural & Roofing Work | 40% of the total contract | 25/Apr/2025 | $20,000 |
Interior & Handover | 100% of the balance | 30/Jun/2025 | $10,000 |
Total Revenue Recognized= $50,000 | |||
The company ensures that its financial statement accurately reflects real project progress by only reporting revenue when each phase is completed, rather than relying on an automated schedule that may not match the actual work done.
If you look at the revenue recognition report, it will show up like this,
i) Recognized Revenue Report
At the end of the project,
Month | Recognized Revenue |
Jan 2025 | $5000 |
Feb 2025 | $15,000 |
Mar 2025 | $0 |
Apr 2025 | $20,000 |
May 2025 | $0 |
Jun 2025 | $10,000 |
Total Recognized | $50,000 |
ii) Deferred Revenue Report
As the project progresses, deferred value gets recognized.
Month | Deferred Revenue |
Jan 2025 | $45,000 |
Feb 2025 | $30,000 |
Mar 2025 | $30,000 |
Apr 2025 | $10,000 |
May 2025 | $10,000 |
Jun 2025 | $0 |
iii) Revenue Waterfall Report
Billing Date | Total Billed | Jan 2025 | Feb 2025 | Mar 2025 | Apr 2025 | May 2025 | Jun 2025 | Recognized Revenue | Deferred Revenue |
Jan 2025 | $50,000 | $5,000 | $15,000 | $0 | $20,000 | $0 | $10,000 | $50,000 | $0 |
The project owner ensures that revenue is recorded accurately only after each milestone is completed, and this is done manually without any specific frequency.
Example 2:
A software consulting firm signs a $120,000 contract to implement an in-house ERP solution with a client. The client pays the amount upfront, but the project involves phases that don't follow uniform timelines/deadlines.
The defined timelines are,
Requirement Analysis & Resource Planning: $10,000
System Customization: 25% of the total contract
Testing & QA: 35% of total contract
Deployment & Support: Remaining contract value
Milestone | Recognition | Completion Date | Amount Recognized |
Requirement Analysis & Planning | Fixed Cost | 15/Jan/2025 | $10,000 |
System Customization | 25% of the contract value | 10/Mar/2025 | $30,000 |
Testing & QA | 35% of the contact value | 25/May/2025 | $42,000 |
Deployment & Support | 100% of the balance | 30/Jul/2025 | $38,000 |
Total Revenue Recognized= $120,000 | |||
When you look at the revenue recognition report for this software deployment, it will show up as follows,
i) Recognized Revenue Report
At the end of the deployment,
Month | Recognized Revenue |
Jan 2025 | $10,000 |
Feb 2025 | $0 |
Mar 2025 | $30,000 |
Apr 2025 | $0 |
May 2025 | $42,000 |
Jun 2025 | $0 |
Jul 2025 | $38,000 |
Total Recognized | $120,000 |
ii) Deferred Revenue Report
As the development progresses, deferred value gets recognized.
Month | Deferred Revenue |
Jan 2025 | $110,000 |
Feb 2025 | $110,000 |
Mar 2025 | $80,000 |
Apr 2025 | $0 |
May 2025 | $38,000 |
Jun 2025 | $38,000 |
Jul 2025 | $0 |
iii) Revenue Waterfall Report
Billing Date | Total Billed | Jan 2025 | Feb 2025 | Mar 2025 | Apr 2025 | May 2025 | Jun 2025 | Jul 2025 | Recognized Revenue | Deferred Revenue |
Jan 2025 | $120,000 | $10,000 | $0 | $30,000 | $0 | $42,000 | $0 | $38,000 | $120,000 | $0 |
Manual revenue recognition is critical when automated rules don't serve the purpose. As we saw through construction and IT consulting examples, Zoho Billing allows businesses to recognize revenue at the right amount and time, ensuring financial statements remain aligned with real project progress.
While we learn the manual recognition process, we will explore these specific industry types in future posts and provide a detailed walk-through of how these businesses record their earnings.
Our next post will start with the SaaS industry, where revenue recognition follows a very different pattern. Unlike milestone-based revenue recognition, SaaS depends more on a recurring billing cycle.
Stay tuned as we explore revenue recognition for SaaS businesses in a few days.
Topic Participants
Hari | Zoho Billing
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
Zoho Desk Android and iOS app update: Agent detail overview
Hello everyone! We’ve introduced agent detail overview on the Zoho Desk Android and iOS app update. With this feature, you can get a complete view of agent’s tickets, response times, logged hours (for both tickets and activities), customer happiness ratingsBlog Widget: Show recent blog posts on my homepage
Hey there I am using the Zoho Sites Blog feature. On my homepage, on the bottom I'd like to have a featured content section where I show some of my blog posts (selected, most recent, filtered by category and so on...). It would be nice to have a blogHow to iterate through excel data using zoho rpa
I wanted to iterate or loop through excel data ( datatable). How can i do thatZoho Commerce
Hi, I have zoho one and use Zoho Books. I am very interested in Zoho Commerce , especially with how all is integrated but have a question. I do not want my store to show prices for customers that are not log in. Is there a way to hide the prices if notMass (Pull back) (Close WOs) (Close APs)
Hi develop team. Just idea because Zoho FSM is great but its too manual. we have a lot of task to do every day and the system needs to have more features to automatic our tasks. I need to close several WOs, APs and Pull Back per day. Please we need massCustomising Zohidesk portal default widgets
Hello, I'm wondering how could I customise the default widgets such as "popular topics", "popular articles" using CSS or to make the tiles at the bottom match the ones that I made in the picture attached. I have made some custom widgets and edited themIf there’s a batch at the end, the ‘mark as inactive’ function doesn’t work.
when my batch has a date to batch end and I "mark as inactive" he batch does not obey the status and reactivates the batch.Seamless multilingual messaging and tone control in Zia IM Composer
Hello everyone! Managing customer conversations across multiple languages can be time-consuming. Using Zia in the Instant Messaging (IM) Composer helps you overcome this by providing tools to translate content, adjust your tone, and refine your messagesAdvanced Deluge help needed with custom function and COQL limits
I have a scheduled function that takes a snapshot of specific metrics and saves them to a custom module. However I'm struggling with the limits of COQL. I attach my full code, but an example of the issues I'm having is that it's erroring with a 'LimitTip of the Week - Conditional Formatting Chart
Conditional formatting allows you to highlight your data series based on a pattern or a trend in your data. This makes it easy for you to identify when your data reaches certain values or when it deviates from the trend. Zoho Analytics allows you toZoho Learn - AI Translate
Hi Learn team, I had a situation today where I was providing training to a client team and I had written articles into their Zoho Learn to support their learning. I realised that one of the team members was a non-native English speaker and they were strugglingPower of Automation :: Auto-Sync Custom Date Field Between Related Tasks via Blueprint Transition
Hello Everyone, A custom function is a software code that can be used to automate a process and this allows you to automate a notification, call a webhook, or perform logic immediately after a workflow rule is triggered. This feature helps to automateIntroducing auto-upgrade in Zoho LandingPage
Hi everyone, We’re excited to share an upcoming update to help you get the most out of your landing pages — the auto-upgrade option, launching on October 22, 2025. Your landing pages are designed to bring in leads, and we want to make sure you never missWorkdrive comment links stopped working.
I have marked a PDF file with 95 comments, they have worked for a while. When i clicked on them they brought me to the correct page and showed me the outline that i had drew on the plans. The comments included the page number of the outline, but now itHow to Bulk-Update Sales Orders in CRM
Hi - I need to bulk update existing sales orders with dates from our ERP of when the sales orders were created. I made a date field on the Sales Order module where I want to insert that data. I can't Mass Update because I am not updating the fields toZoho ToDo in Cliq
Our organization utilizes Zoho ToDo in the Zoho Mail Desktop app. Is there a way for these to show up in Cliq Desktop app as well?【Zoho CRM】サンドボックス機能のアップデート：カスタムビューが利用可能になりました。
ユーザーの皆さま、こんにちは。コミュニティチームの中野です。 今回は「Zoho CRM アップデート情報」の中から、サンドボックス機能のアップデートをご紹介します。 目次 1. カスタムビューとは 2. 今回の機能アップデートについて 1. カスタムビューとは カスタムビューは、ユーザーが設定した条件に基づいてデータをフィルタリング・整理し、 重要な情報へ効率的にアクセスできるようにする機能です。 「過去15日間の見込み客」や「受注間近の商談」、「特定の優先度レベルが設定された案件」など 条件を指定してわずか数クリックで設定できます。Changing an agents email address
How do you change an agent's email address? I keep getting a red circle even though I am an admin. And on one of my agents he has two email addresses? How is that possible?Zoho CRM - Potentials Tab
Hi! When I create a Deal (Potentials tab) the header looks like this: After a refresh on the page it looks like this: What should I do so that it is displayed like in the second pic without refresh? Also I have a user that as of recently, cannot see thisIs there a way to automatically add Secondary Contacts (CCs) when creating a new ticket for specific customers?
Some of our customers want multiple contacts to receive all notifications from our support team. Is there a way to automatically add secondary contacts to a ticket when our support team opens a new ticket and associates it with an account? This wouldUnable to create embed code for resource of workdrive using API
Hello Team, I am trying to create embed code for a resource using workdrive api in powershell, however facing some issues with injecting data in body. Followed Doc: https://workdrive.zoho.com/apidocs/v1/filefoldersharing/shareeveryone Please help, belowFeature Request - Insert URL Links in Folders
I would love to see the ability to create simple URL links with titles in WorkDrive. or perhaps a WorkDrive extension to allow it. Example use case: A team is working on a project and there is project folder in WordDrive. The team uses LucidChart to createnot able to convert pdf to jpg and other forms and vice versa.
i want to change my pdf to jpg, word, etc and some times jpg to pdf. i don't know how to do in this.Enable / show scroll bar when Mega Menu is opened
Hey there I am using the mega menu add-on and experience a "flicker" whenever the mega menu opens. The reason is, that the scrollbar, which has a width of a few pixels, stops showing when the mega menu opens. As the scrollbar disappears the whole pageReports: Custom Search Function Fields
Hi Zoho, Hope you'll add this into your roadmap. Issue: For the past 2yrs our global team been complaining and was brought to our attention recently that it's a time consuming process looking/scrolling down. Use-case: This form is a service report withZoho Inventory - Composite Items - Assembly - Single Line Item Quantity of One
Hi Zoho Inventory Team, Please consider relaxing the system rules which prevent an assembly items from consisting of a single line item and outputting a quantity of 1. A client I'm currently working with sells cosmetics and offers testers of their productsHow can I transfer data from Production to Development environment?
Hi, I am using Creator V6 and would like to bring all the data in production to the Development and Testing environments? Is there an easy way of doing that or I have to export and import each table?Add "Reset MFA" Option for Zoho Creator Client Portal Users
Hello Zoho Creator Team, We hope you are doing well. We would like to request an important enhancement related to Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) for client portal users in Zoho Creator. Currently, Creator allows us to enforce MFA for portal users,New portal SAML authentication error: User not found
Dears, Has anyone else been experiencing this lately? I am creating a new portal authenticated by SAML (Entra ID). I followed the same process as I did with other portals, but any new portal created after this always encounters this error. I’ve been reportingDevis et facture multi page
Bonjour, je suis sur Zoho invoice et je rencontre un problème sur mes devis et factures lorsqu'ils dépassent 1 page. je me retrouve souvent avec des lignes coupées ou le sous total page 1 et le total page 2. j'aimerai savoir s'il existe une possibilitéHelp with Filtering Records, HTML Pages, and Automatic File Uploads in Zoho Creator
Hi Zoho Creator Community, I’m building a Zoho Creator application and need guidance on a few features I’ve been struggling with. I want to implement them safely and efficiently, and I’d appreciate any examples, tips, or best practices. I want users toConvert invoice from zoho to xml with all details
How to convert an Invoice to XML format with all detailsFeature Suggestion for Zoho Websites – Inspired by Squarespace Systems
Dear Zoho Team, I’m a Zoho user and also a Squarespace Platinum Circle member, and I recently noticed the launch of Zoho Websites in India. I wanted to share some ideas for features that could enhance the platform for professional users and agencies.Custom View - Sort by Custom Field
I created a custom field for our Engineering team to know which tickets to work first by numbering them. I created a custom view to general data which includes the Engineering Priority. However, I cannot sort the Engineering Priority column ascendingZoho Indeed Intergation not pulling candidate details
We have recently integrated zoho with indeed. Prior to this our candidates came into the candidates tab via the zoho.resumes email address from indeed and it pulled through the candidates mobile number, and majority of the time a postcode. However sinceCustom View of tickets created today
How can I create a custom view that list all my ticked created in the current date? Currently, if I select the "Created Time" criteria, the "Current Time" option does not work as today. Actually, I don't know how it works this "Current Time".Lifecycle Reports
From data to decisions: A deep dive into ticketing system reports A lifecycle report captures and visualises the sequential states that a ticket undergoes across its lifespan. For instance, when a customer submits a support ticket for a faulty product,Zoho Forms - Print Button on Forms
Hi Forms team, I'm replicating a form for a client which is currently based on JotForm. I noticed that at the end of the form there is a button to print the completed form. I thought this would be something worth sharing and a nice to have in Zoho Forms.Putting Watermark on Zoho Sheet
Can this be done?Validation function not preventing candidates under 18 or over 30 from submitting the web form
Hello everyone, I’m trying to create a validation rule for the Candidate Webform in Zoho Recruit. I added a custom field called “Date of Birth”, and I want to make sure that candidates cannot submit the form unless their age is between 18 and 30 years.Next Page