Category: Uncategorized

What you’ll find in this blog:

• Salesforce innovation is now focused on Agentforce Revenue Management, a native platform that offers improved performance, tighter integration, and a future-ready architecture compared to CPQ.
• Agentforce Revenue Management connects quoting, contracts, billing, and fulfilment on a single data model, enabling a more unified revenue lifecycle.
• Organisations can adopt capabilities such as Contract Lifecycle Management or Dynamic Revenue Orchestration independently, allowing a phased approach rather than a full migration.
• Exploring the transition now positions organisations to take advantage of ongoing innovation and AI-driven revenue operations.

If you have been running Salesforce CPQ for a few years, it has likely served you well. It brought structure to your quoting process, enforced pricing rules, and gave your sales team a guided path from opportunity to quote. However, the landscape is shifting, and Salesforce’s investment is now firmly focused on Agentforce Revenue Management.

So what does this mean for CPQ customers, and why should you care?

A Platform Built on Core, Not a Managed Package

The most fundamental difference between Salesforce CPQ and Agentforce Revenue Management is architectural. CPQ runs as a managed package on top of Salesforce, which has always introduced constraints such as governor limits, upgrade dependencies, and limitations around customisation and calculations. ARM is built natively on the Salesforce core platform, using standard objects rather than package objects. This enables tighter integration with the rest of your organisation, improved performance, and a future-ready foundation that evolves with each Salesforce release rather than lagging behind.

For teams that have spent years managing workarounds and technical debt within CPQ, this shift alone is significant.

The Benefits of Making the Move

A Unified Revenue Lifecycle

CPQ has always been just one piece of a broader puzzle. Billing, contracts, order management, and revenue recognition often required separate tools or significant integration effort. Agentforce Revenue Management brings these capabilities together on a single platform with a shared data model, allowing the quote your representative creates to flow seamlessly through to contract, order, fulfilment, and invoice without data gaps or reconciliation challenges.

API-First Architecture

Every revenue process in Agentforce Revenue Management is exposed as an API. This makes it much simpler to connect your quoting and pricing engine to e-commerce portals, partner channels, or customer self-service experiences. If you have previously struggled to align CPQ pricing with an external system, you will recognise how significant this improvement is.

Scalability for Complex Configurations

The new Advanced Configurator introduces constraint-based configuration, replacing the rigid if-then rule logic that CPQ relied on. Instead of maintaining thousands of product and price rules that become increasingly fragile as your catalogue grows, you define relationships and allow the solver engine to determine valid configurations automatically. This represents a fundamentally more scalable approach to managing product complexity.

You Do Not Have to Adopt Everything at Once

One of the most compelling aspects of Agentforce Revenue Management is its composability. You can begin with the capabilities that address your most pressing challenges and expand over time.

Take Contract Lifecycle Management as an example. Many CPQ customers currently rely on third-party tools to manage contract generation, redlining, approvals, and e-signatures. With Agentforce Revenue Management, CLM is native. You can generate contracts directly from approved quotes, manage clause libraries, automate approval workflows, and handle e-signatures without leaving Salesforce. Legal teams can maintain pre-approved templates and clause libraries, while AI-driven clause generation helps accelerate drafting. According to KPMG, up to 40 percent of a contract’s value can be lost due to CLM inefficiencies. For organisations where the contract stage is a bottleneck in the deal cycle, adopting CLM alone could deliver immediate and measurable value.

Similarly, Dynamic Revenue Orchestration is another capability that can be leveraged independently. DRO provides a visual design canvas to map how commercial orders are broken down into fulfilment tasks, billing schedules, and downstream system hand-offs. If your current post-sale process involves manual order management or inefficient integrations between CPQ and your ERP system, DRO can streamline the entire workflow without requiring you to reimplement your quoting process from the beginning.

The key point is that migration does not need to be a greenfield project. You can adopt specific modules where the return on investment is clearest and build from there.

Looking Ahead

Salesforce has made it clear that Agentforce Revenue Management represents the future of revenue operations on the platform. CPQ is not disappearing immediately, but the pace of innovation is clearly aligned with the new architecture. Each major release is introducing new capabilities to Agentforce Revenue Management, including enhanced pricing formulas, multi-order creation, and deeper Agentforce AI integration, while CPQ’s roadmap is largely focused on maintenance. If you are currently planning CPQ enhancements or encountering limitations with your existing setup, now is an appropriate time to evaluate whether those efforts would be better directed towards Agentforce Revenue Management instead.

Organisations that begin exploring this transition now will be best positioned to take advantage of AI-driven revenue operations as the platform continues to mature.

Samantha Mathie

Samantha Mathie is a Senior Digital Marketing Executive at Xenogenix and has been part of the business for four years. Before joining Xenogenix, she spent more than eight years working independently as a marketing consultant.
With a background in IT, telecommunications and video conferencing, Samantha specialises in B2B technology marketing, digital campaigns, content and connected customer journeys. She is particularly skilled at turning complex subjects into clear, engaging communications.
As an author for Xenogenix, Samantha shares practical guidance on digital marketing, campaign planning, content and communicating technology effectively.

Xenogenix is proud to announce that we have been awarded the Certinia Customer Delivery Excellence Award (International) 2025.

The award recognises partners who consistently deliver high-quality implementations and ongoing customer outcomes. Certinia highlighted Xenogenix for our delivery standards, strong customer satisfaction scores, and the depth of expertise across our certified consultant team.

“Xenogenix stood out for their consistent delivery quality, strong CSAT scores, and the depth of expertise across their certified consultant team. From implementation to outcomes, the Xenogenix team brings a level of care and commitment that customers feel and value. We’re proud to recognize their dedication to delivery excellence.”

For us, this recognition is particularly meaningful because it reflects how we approach every engagement. Our teams work closely with customers from initial design through to adoption and long-term support, ensuring the solution delivers measurable value rather than simply being implemented.

This award belongs to the entire Xenogenix team – across delivery, managed services, operations and support – all of whom contribute to the experience our customers receive every day.

We would also like to thank our customers and partners for the trust they place in us. We look forward to continuing to help organisations get the most from their Certinia and Salesforce investment.

Ben Morton

Ben Morton is Product Lead at Xenogenix, with over 10 years’ experience translating complex business requirements into practical Salesforce and Certinia solutions.

Ben specialises in financial systems and has extensive knowledge of Certinia, Salesforce and Conga. His consulting, implementation and commercial experience enables him to design scalable solutions that improve processes and deliver meaningful business results.

As an author for Xenogenix, Ben shares practical guidance on Certinia, financial transformation, solution design and business process improvement.

This blog explores:

• Why Salesforce platforms struggle more with friction than missing functionality
• How optimisation improves adoption, confidence, and delivery
• Common signs technical debt is slowing Salesforce teams down
• Practical ways to prioritise optimisation before adding complexity

Salesforce platforms rarely fail because they lack functionality.

They struggle because complexity builds faster than usability.

Over time, good decisions accumulate. Quick fixes become permanent. Processes drift away from how teams actually work. Before long, Salesforce still functions, but it feels heavier. Changes feel riskier. Adoption quietly declines.

This is where optimisation becomes more valuable than expansion.

Expansion feels productive. Optimisation creates impact.

Adding features feels like progress.

Optimisation creates space.

When teams focus on improving what already exists, they often unlock value faster than they would by building something new.

Optimisation typically targets:

• page layouts that no longer reflect real workflows
• fields that exist without purpose
• automation layered on automation
• reports users no longer trust

None of these are dramatic failures. They are gradual drifts.

Left unchecked, they slow everything down.

Adoption is a design problem, not a motivation problem

Low adoption is rarely about effort or training.

It is usually a signal that Salesforce no longer fits how people work day to day.

When screens are cluttered and processes feel slower than workarounds, users disengage.

Small design improvements often restore adoption faster than large transformation programmes.

Technical debt hides in plain sight

In Salesforce, technical debt often looks normal.

It lives in:

• overlapping automation
• inconsistent data models
• customisations nobody owns
• areas of the platform teams avoid touching

These issues rarely break Salesforce.

They just make change harder than it should be.

Optimisation brings confidence back into delivery.

What strong Salesforce teams optimise first

Teams that see consistent results tend to focus on:

• removing friction from core workflows
• simplifying data models
• improving trust in reporting
• reducing risk before adding complexity

They treat optimisation as ongoing, not a one-off project.

A practical approach

If your Salesforce platform feels harder to change than it used to, start here:

• review adoption hotspots
• identify areas teams avoid changing
• simplify layouts and processes
• address technical debt selectively

You do not need to fix everything.

You need to fix what matters most.

Optimisation is how Salesforce moves from being something teams manage to something they rely on.

If you’d like to talk through where optimisation could unlock value in your Salesforce platform, we’re always happy to help.

Samantha Mathie

Samantha Mathie is a Senior Digital Marketing Executive at Xenogenix and has been part of the business for four years. Before joining Xenogenix, she spent more than eight years working independently as a marketing consultant.
With a background in IT, telecommunications and video conferencing, Samantha specialises in B2B technology marketing, digital campaigns, content and connected customer journeys. She is particularly skilled at turning complex subjects into clear, engaging communications.
As an author for Xenogenix, Samantha shares practical guidance on digital marketing, campaign planning, content and communicating technology effectively.

This blog covers:

• Why Salesforce clarity alone does not drive results
• How teams turn roadmap insight into meaningful action
• What real Salesforce progress looks like beyond features
• Practical ways to move from reset to momentum

January often gives Salesforce teams a moment to pause.

Roadmaps are reviewed. Technical debt becomes more visible. Adoption challenges surface. For many organisations, this creates a welcome sense of clarity.

The real challenge is what happens next.

Too often, that clarity fades as delivery accelerates and priorities multiply. Teams slip back into reactive ways of working, adding new functionality before resolving friction underneath.

The strongest Salesforce teams treat February as a pivot point.

They move from understanding their platform to actively reshaping how it supports the business.

Why clarity alone is not enough

Clear roadmaps and well-defined priorities are important, but they only create value when they change behaviour.

If teams return to:

• reacting to every new request
• adding features without addressing friction
• tolerating workarounds
• accepting slow or risky change as “normal”

then the reset becomes temporary.

Clarity must translate into action.

Real progress starts when teams use early-year insight to simplify decisions, reduce noise, and focus on outcomes rather than activity.

Turning insight into meaningful priorities

Once foundations are clearer, decision-making should become easier.

Strong Salesforce teams ask different questions:

• Which initiatives will deliver measurable impact this quarter?
• What work removes friction for users right now?
• Where does technical debt slow delivery or reduce confidence?
• What changes will help teams trust Salesforce more?

This shifts focus away from how much is delivered and towards what actually matters.

It also helps teams say no to low-value work and not yet to risky changes.

Moving from roadmap to execution

At this stage, it is tempting to accelerate everything.

Effective teams do the opposite.

They slow down just enough to sequence work properly.

They:

• tackle high-impact issues first
• avoid stacking new functionality on unresolved problems
• protect time for optimisation alongside new delivery

This approach reduces risk, improves adoption, and builds confidence across delivery teams and stakeholders.

Momentum comes from thoughtful execution, not speed alone.

Measuring progress differently

Salesforce success does not always show up in release notes.

It shows up in smaller, more meaningful ways:

• faster decisions
• fewer workarounds
• higher trust in reports and dashboards
• smoother change cycles
• calmer delivery

These signals often tell you more about platform health than feature counts or sprint velocity.

They reflect whether Salesforce is genuinely supporting how the business operates.

A simple way forward

If you are moving from a January reset into February delivery, focus on three things:

1. Simplify priorities
   Choose work that directly supports business outcomes.
2. Remove friction before adding complexity
   Fix adoption and technical issues before scaling functionality.
3. Tie Salesforce activity to real impact
   Make sure every initiative has a clear purpose.

This is how clarity becomes momentum.

And this is how Salesforce shifts from being something teams manage to something they rely on.

If you would like an outside perspective on how your Salesforce platform is supporting execution, we are always happy to have a conversation.

Paul McVitty

Paul McVitty is a Senior Salesforce Consultant at Xenogenix with over 10 years’ experience designing, implementing and optimising Salesforce solutions for organisations across a range of industries. He specialises in helping businesses maximise the value of their Salesforce investment through practical, scalable solutions that improve sales, service and operational efficiency.

Holding 10 Salesforce certifications, including Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Experience Cloud, Field Service, CPQ, Advanced Administrator, Platform App Builder, Business Analyst and AI Associate, Paul brings deep technical expertise alongside a strong understanding of business processes and user adoption.

As an author for Xenogenix, Paul shares practical guidance, implementation best practices and insights into Salesforce, AI, CRM strategy and digital transformation, helping organisations make informed technology decisions and get more from their Salesforce platform.

Paul holds both a BA (Hons) and an MA and has worked with organisations ranging from growing businesses to complex enterprise environments. His focus is always on delivering solutions that create measurable business value while remaining easy for users to adopt and maintain.

xenogenix.co.uk/experts/paul-mcvitty-2/

This blog explores:

• Why rushing Salesforce delivery in January often creates friction later
• How early clarity improves roadmap decisions and delivery confidence
• The role January plays in setting Salesforce patterns for the year
• What strong Salesforce teams focus on before accelerating change

Why Strong Salesforce Teams Do Not Rush January

January often comes with pressure to move fast.

New targets. New initiatives. A sense that delivery needs to ramp up immediately. In Salesforce programmes, this urgency can feel especially strong when roadmaps are already full and expectations are high.

But the strongest Salesforce teams consistently do something different.

They do not rush January.

The cost of starting the year in a hurry

When teams accelerate too quickly at the start of the year, they tend to carry forward assumptions that were never challenged.

Roadmap items roll over because they existed last year. Technical debt remains untouched because it has become familiar. Adoption issues are tolerated because they feel too disruptive to fix now.

On the surface, delivery looks busy. Underneath, friction quietly builds.

This is how Salesforce platforms end up feeling harder to change than they should.

Why a pause creates leverage

Strong teams understand that January offers something rare.

Space.

Space to ask whether priorities still make sense. Space to look at where the platform supports the business and where it gets in the way. Space to fix small issues before they become structural problems.

This pause is not about slowing progress. It is about increasing leverage.

When foundations are clear, teams stop wasting energy on debates, workarounds, and risk management. Decisions become easier because there is less noise and more trust in the platform.

Clarity beats urgency

Urgency often feels productive. It creates motion and visible activity.

Clarity creates something more valuable. Confidence.

Confidence that the roadmap reflects real business outcomes. Confidence that the platform can change safely. Confidence that users trust the system they are being asked to rely on.

This is why momentum built on clarity scales, while momentum built on urgency rarely does.

What strong Salesforce teams focus on in January

Rather than rushing delivery, strong teams use January to:

• reduce noise in the roadmap
• understand where technical debt is affecting confidence
• address adoption friction that has become normalised

None of this requires a full rebuild. Most of the time, it is about asking better questions and making a small number of deliberate improvements.

The payoff comes later in the year, when change accelerates and pressure increases.

January sets the tone for the year

Salesforce platforms tend to amplify whatever patterns are set early.

If January is reactive, the year often stays reactive. If January is thoughtful and intentional, teams carry that confidence forward.

This is why strong Salesforce teams treat January as a strategic moment, not just a return to delivery.

January is not about doing less.

It is about choosing better.

Samantha Mathie

Samantha Mathie is a Senior Digital Marketing Executive at Xenogenix and has been part of the business for four years. Before joining Xenogenix, she spent more than eight years working independently as a marketing consultant.
With a background in IT, telecommunications and video conferencing, Samantha specialises in B2B technology marketing, digital campaigns, content and connected customer journeys. She is particularly skilled at turning complex subjects into clear, engaging communications.
As an author for Xenogenix, Samantha shares practical guidance on digital marketing, campaign planning, content and communicating technology effectively.

This blog explains:

• What Salesforce technical debt really looks like beyond code and configuration
• How hidden technical debt slows delivery and increases risk
• The impact technical debt has on user confidence and adoption
• Why January is the best time to address Salesforce technical debt before roadmaps accelerate

Salesforce technical debt rarely announces itself.

There is no single moment where teams decide to create it. Instead, it builds quietly over time as platforms evolve, priorities shift, and short-term fixes become long-term habits.

By the time it is noticed, delivery feels slower, changes feel riskier, and confidence in the platform has started to fade.

What technical debt really looks like in Salesforce

Technical debt is often misunderstood as untidy configuration or legacy code.

In reality, it shows up in far more subtle ways:

• Automation that has grown layer by layer, with no clear ownership
• Custom fields that mean different things to different teams
• Processes that no longer match how the business actually operates
• Reports and dashboards that are no longer trusted

None of these issues stop Salesforce working. They just make everything harder than it needs to be.

Why ignored technical debt slows delivery

As technical debt grows, teams begin to feel it in everyday work.

Simple changes take longer to deliver. Testing becomes more complex. Small requests carry unexpected risk. Over time, hesitation creeps in and progress slows.

This is when organisations often respond by adding controls, approvals, or more documentation. In reality, the problem is rarely governance. It is friction built into the platform itself.

The hidden impact on user adoption

Technical debt does not only affect delivery teams.

When Salesforce becomes harder to change, it also becomes harder to use. Interfaces grow cluttered. Processes feel rigid. Users lose confidence in data quality and start working around the system rather than with it.

Low adoption is often treated as a training issue. More often, it is a signal that the platform no longer reflects reality.

Why January is the right time to address it

January creates a natural opportunity to reset.

Teams are reassessing priorities. Roadmaps are being shaped. There is space to question assumptions before delivery pressure ramps up.

Addressing technical debt early in the year makes every subsequent improvement easier. It restores confidence in change and reduces the risk that new features simply add to existing problems.

Where to start without overcomplicating things

Reducing technical debt does not require a full rebuild.

A strong starting point is to:

• Identify automation that no one feels confident changing
• Review custom fields that are heavily used but poorly understood
• Look for areas where workarounds have become normal
• Talk to users about where Salesforce feels slow or frustrating

Small, targeted improvements in these areas often deliver outsized returns.

Looking ahead

Later this month, we will be sharing a Salesforce Foundations Reset Guide that brings together practical checks for roadmaps, technical debt, and adoption.

It is designed to help teams spot friction early and make informed decisions before adding new complexity.

A cleaner Salesforce foundation does not just reduce risk. It creates the confidence needed to move faster when it matters.

Samantha Mathie

Samantha Mathie is a Senior Digital Marketing Executive at Xenogenix and has been part of the business for four years. Before joining Xenogenix, she spent more than eight years working independently as a marketing consultant.
With a background in IT, telecommunications and video conferencing, Samantha specialises in B2B technology marketing, digital campaigns, content and connected customer journeys. She is particularly skilled at turning complex subjects into clear, engaging communications.
As an author for Xenogenix, Samantha shares practical guidance on digital marketing, campaign planning, content and communicating technology effectively.

In this blog, you’ll learn:

• Why January is the best time to reset your Salesforce foundations
• How to realign your Salesforce roadmap to current business priorities
• The hidden technical debt that slows Salesforce delivery and adoption

January often comes with pressure to move fast.

New initiatives, new targets, new features on the roadmap. But in Salesforce, the strongest years rarely start with adding more. They start by fixing what is already there.

What we see time and again is organisations building on foundations that quietly weakened over the previous year. The result is friction, slow delivery, and low confidence in the platform.

A reset now can change the trajectory of the entire year.

Why January is the right moment to reset

January creates a natural pause. Teams are back, budgets are clearer, and priorities are being reassessed.

It is also the point where issues that were tolerated last year tend to surface. Workarounds become habits. Adoption drops. Roadmaps carry forward assumptions that no longer hold.

Taking time to reset your Salesforce foundations now is far easier than trying to correct course in Q3.

Foundation area one: your Salesforce roadmap

A healthy roadmap is not just a list of features.

Ask yourself:

• Is the roadmap still aligned to current business goals
• Are you building new functionality to solve old problems
• Are priorities based on value or noise

If your roadmap has not been questioned since last year, January is the right time to do it. Clarity here prevents wasted effort later.

Foundation area two: technical debt

Technical debt is not just untidy configuration or legacy code.

It shows up as:

• Automation that nobody fully understands
• Custom fields that mean different things to different teams
• Performance issues that slow users down
• Changes taking longer than they should

Left unchecked, technical debt quietly taxes every Salesforce improvement you try to make. Tidying the foundations first makes everything that follows faster and safer.

Foundation area three: user adoption

Low adoption is rarely a user problem.

More often, it is a signal that Salesforce no longer fits the way teams actually work. Processes drift. Interfaces become cluttered. Reports stop being trusted.

Before launching new features, it is worth asking:

• Are users confident in the data
• Are processes still relevant
• Is Salesforce helping or getting in the way

Improving adoption early in the year delivers immediate returns and builds trust in the platform.

What a reset gives you

Organisations that reset their Salesforce foundations in January tend to see:

• Clearer priorities
• Faster delivery later in the year
• Better engagement from users
• Fewer surprises when change accelerates

Most importantly, it creates confidence that Salesforce is supporting the business rather than holding it back.

A final thought

January is not about slowing down. It is about choosing where to apply momentum.

Resetting your Salesforce foundations now gives you a cleaner, more confident platform to build on for the rest of the year.

If you want support reviewing your roadmap, technical debt, or adoption challenges, this is exactly the kind of work we help teams with.

Samantha Mathie

Samantha Mathie is a Senior Digital Marketing Executive at Xenogenix and has been part of the business for four years. Before joining Xenogenix, she spent more than eight years working independently as a marketing consultant.
With a background in IT, telecommunications and video conferencing, Samantha specialises in B2B technology marketing, digital campaigns, content and connected customer journeys. She is particularly skilled at turning complex subjects into clear, engaging communications.
As an author for Xenogenix, Samantha shares practical guidance on digital marketing, campaign planning, content and communicating technology effectively.

Certinia’s Winter 26 Release continues the company’s focus on helping services-based organisations operate with greater clarity, speed, and confidence. This release introduces a range of enhancements across professional services automation, customer success, and financial management, with a strong emphasis on intelligent assistance and guided workflows.

As teams face increasing pressure to deliver predictable outcomes while managing complexity, Winter 26 provides tools designed to reduce manual work, surface insights sooner, and support better decision-making across the lifecycle of a customer engagement.

AI Powered Insights That Support Proactive Delivery

A key theme of the Winter 26 Release is the expanded use of AI to help teams identify issues before they become problems. New AI driven assistants and summaries are designed to highlight important signals such as data gaps, potential risks, and changes in project or account status.

By bringing this information together in clear, accessible summaries, teams can spend less time searching for context and more time taking action. This is particularly valuable for project managers, customer success leaders, and executives who need a quick but reliable view of what is happening across multiple engagements.

Dynamic Playbooks for More Consistent Execution

Winter 26 also introduces more dynamic and responsive playbooks. These playbooks adjust based on real conditions, such as customer health or policy requirements, rather than relying on static checklists.

The result is more consistent execution across teams while still allowing flexibility for different scenarios. Whether guiding onboarding activities, renewal preparation, or issue resolution, dynamic playbooks help ensure that best practice is applied at the right time.

Faster Estimating and Quoting

Creating accurate estimates and quotes for complex services engagements can be time-consuming. The Winter 26 Release includes enhancements that make this process faster and more scalable, particularly for larger or more complex deals.

With improved estimation models and role based multipliers, teams can build quotes more efficiently while maintaining accuracy and alignment with delivery plans. This helps reduce friction between sales and delivery and supports smoother handovers once work begins.

Finance Enhancements That Scale with the Business

On the finance side, Winter 26 delivers improvements that help organisations manage growth and complexity more effectively. Updates focus on streamlining workflows such as revenue recognition, cash matching, and contract lifecycle events.

These enhancements are designed to support higher volumes and more complex scenarios without adding unnecessary manual effort, helping finance teams maintain control while keeping pace with the business.

Bringing It All Together

The Certinia Winter 26 Release is about enabling teams to work smarter across the entire services and customer lifecycle. By combining AI powered insights, adaptive guidance, and streamlined operational workflows, this release helps organisations improve visibility, reduce risk, and deliver value more consistently.

To explore all features, detailed release notes, and upcoming enablement sessions, visit the Winter 26 Release Hub.

Ben Morton

Ben Morton is Product Lead at Xenogenix, with over 10 years’ experience translating complex business requirements into practical Salesforce and Certinia solutions.

Ben specialises in financial systems and has extensive knowledge of Certinia, Salesforce and Conga. His consulting, implementation and commercial experience enables him to design scalable solutions that improve processes and deliver meaningful business results.

As an author for Xenogenix, Ben shares practical guidance on Certinia, financial transformation, solution design and business process improvement.

What you’ll find in this blog:

• Revenue management challenges continue to impact accuracy, compliance and forecasting, particularly across Salesforce and Certinia environments.
• Common issues include data misalignment, manual adjustments, incorrect schedule configuration, missing pre-run checks and poor documentation.
• Strengthening data governance, reducing manual processes and improving schedule and process control can significantly reduce operational risk.
• Organisations that invest in automation, ownership clarity and proactive quality checks will see more predictable, efficient and compliant revenue performance in 2026.

Revenue management has become one of the most complex operational functions within modern businesses. As subscription models evolve, hybrid billing structures grow in popularity and audit requirements tighten, the systems and processes used to recognise revenue are under more pressure than ever.

Across the Salesforce and Certinia ecosystems, we see the same recurring challenges each year — issues that undermine accuracy, delay close cycles, create reconciliation headaches and increase risk. With year-end approaching, now is the ideal time to review where these challenges arise and what steps your organisation can take to avoid them in 2026.

This article explores the five most common challenges in revenue management, why they happen, and how businesses can proactively strengthen their processes for the year ahead.

Challenge 1: Data Misalignment Across the Revenue Lifecycle

One of the most significant causes of revenue issues is inconsistent data across related objects — particularly where contracts, billing schedules, products, and revenue schedules intersect. Even minor misalignment, such as a date difference or incorrect amount, can have serious downstream consequences once revenue is generated.

This typically occurs when contract amendments are processed quickly, when product catalogue changes are made without governance, or when teams rely on manual adjustments that bypass formal processes. Over time, these inconsistencies compound, resulting in revenue events that don’t reflect the commercial reality of the contract.

In 2026, businesses looking to strengthen revenue accuracy should focus on improving data governance, enforcing validation rules and adopting regular reconciliation workflows. When data enters the system correctly — and stays aligned — revenue processes become dramatically more predictable.

Challenge 2: Excessive Reliance on Manual Adjustments

Manual adjustments are often introduced as temporary fixes but quickly turn into embedded habits within revenue teams. Adjustments made in spreadsheets, offline tools or through ad-hoc system updates create fragmentation that’s difficult to track and even harder to audit.

The risks of manual processes are well known: inconsistent treatment of revenue, loss of traceability, and dependency on individual team members who “know how things work.” Even small adjustments can create discrepancies when they aren’t documented or when future users unknowingly overwrite them.

To address this challenge, organisations should develop clear guidelines on when manual adjustments are permissible and ensure that every exception is logged and reviewed. More importantly, recurring adjustments should trigger a deeper investigation into systemic fixes — whether through automation, improved product configuration, or revised upstream processes.

Challenge 3: Incorrect or Inconsistent Revenue Schedule Configuration

Revenue schedules are one of the most sensitive parts of revenue operations, and small configuration errors can lead to major recognition issues. Problems often stem from incorrect revenue templates, misapplied schedule rules or failure to update schedules when product offerings change.

Organisations with fast-growing or evolving product catalogues are especially vulnerable. If new products are added without governance or if existing templates are modified without testing, schedule errors become inevitable.

A proactive approach in 2026 should include regular reviews of revenue templates, better alignment between product management and revenue operations, and stronger approval processes for any changes affecting schedule behaviour. When schedule logic is consistent and predictable, revenue accuracy increases and month-end workloads decrease.

Challenge 4: Running Revenue Processes Without Pre-Run Checks

A surprisingly common challenge occurs when teams run revenue recognition processes without verifying data beforehand. These “blind runs” often result in unexpected variances, missing schedules, incorrect dates or duplicated recognition events — all of which require additional time and effort to rectify.

Pre-run checks are one of the simplest yet most impactful ways to improve year-end outcomes. These checks can include verifying schedule completeness, confirming billing alignment, reviewing contract amendments and ensuring no unresolved adjustments remain in the pipeline.

For organisations operating across multiple revenue streams or complex arrangements, pre-run checklists offer structure and consistency. They help prevent errors before they appear and can shorten the month-end close significantly. Moving into 2026, businesses that embed pre-run quality assurance into their processes will experience greater stability and far fewer last-minute surprises.

Challenge 5: Limited Documentation and Undefined Ownership

Many revenue-management challenges stem not from system limitations but from gaps in documentation, unclear ownership and reliance on informal knowledge. As teams grow or change, undocumented processes create risk and inconsistency — particularly during critical periods like year-end.

When documentation is incomplete, teams may follow outdated procedures, misinterpret system behaviour or apply inconsistent logic. Similarly, when ownership is unclear, tasks can be duplicated, missed or executed differently by different users.

Developing structured process documentation and assigning clear ownership at each stage of the revenue cycle is essential. This ensures continuity, supports onboarding, reduces operational risk and provides clarity during audits.

A strong documentation foundation also helps reveal where processes can be improved, automated or removed entirely. In many cases, simply mapping the existing workflow brings inefficiencies into focus, enabling better decisions in 2026 and beyond.

Preparing for 2026: Turning Challenges Into Opportunities

Each of these challenges represents an opportunity for organisations to build stronger, more reliable revenue operations. The most successful teams in 2026 will be those who adopt a proactive mindset — not waiting for issues to emerge but addressing root causes now.

Here are three strategic areas to focus on for the coming year:

1. Strengthen Data Governance

Ensure upstream processes create clean, consistent data. Introduce validation rules, implement checks and align teams on common standards.

2. Increase Automation Thoughtfully

Identify recurring manual steps and replace them with system-driven logic. Automation reduces risk and creates more scalable processes.

3. Clarify Ownership & Improve Documentation

Build clear accountability into every stage of the revenue lifecycle, and keep documentation up to date as systems evolve.

By investing in these foundations, businesses reduce operational friction, accelerate month-end cycles and build greater confidence in revenue reporting.

Conclusion

As organisations prepare for 2026, now is the perfect time to reflect on processes, identify improvement areas and eliminate common friction points. The challenges outlined in this article are not new — but they continue to appear across companies of every size and industry.

With the right governance, improved automation and a stronger culture of documentation, businesses can overcome these obstacles and build a more predictable, accurate and compliant revenue operation.

And if you’d like support reviewing or enhancing your own revenue processes, our team is here to help.

Ben Morton

Ben Morton is Product Lead at Xenogenix, with over 10 years’ experience translating complex business requirements into practical Salesforce and Certinia solutions.

Ben specialises in financial systems and has extensive knowledge of Certinia, Salesforce and Conga. His consulting, implementation and commercial experience enables him to design scalable solutions that improve processes and deliver meaningful business results.

As an author for Xenogenix, Ben shares practical guidance on Certinia, financial transformation, solution design and business process improvement.