Why use Ops Hub Pro for MRR Forecasting?
HubSpot's Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) tools are only available on Enterprise plans. But even if you have access to this, these MRR fields cannot be tied to forecasting reports on your dashboard or HubSpot's sales goals tool. This means no oversight on how you're actually progressing to monthly revenue goals and you cannot set up notifications on when goals are started, missed or hit.
A workaround to enable forecasting would be to create a separate deal for each monthly payment. However, it would be unrealistic to expect a sales rep to create 12 separate deals for an annual project, for example. And having so many records could mean a greater chance of making mistakes in activity logs and data entry fields.
The Solution
Using "Custom Code" actions available in Operations Hub Pro workflows, we can automate the creation of these forecasting deals in a read-only pipeline that will specifically be used for MRR forecasting and reporting. We will maintain the original pipeline as it is, so sales teams do not experience any major changes to their process and they can focus on logging activity on only one deal.
Maintaining the original pipeline also means that you can still report, forecast and set revenue goals based on Total Contract Value (TCV) of your MRR deals, and maintain any activity-based automation among many other things.
MRR FORECASTING FLOWCHART & ENTITY RELATIONSHIP DIAGRAM (ERD)
Get a copy of the full process flowchart and ERD, which details the purpose of each custom property and workflow that we will be building as part of our forecasting solution.
Step 1: Creating Your Triggers & Custom Properties
In total, we will need to create a total of 14 custom deal properties to make this solution work. This is assuming that you will add 3 one-off payments as we did in our own pipeline. Feel free to add/remove one-off payment fields based on your use case.
Below is a list of all the custom properties you'll need to set up. In each tab, you'll find the exact field type you need to select as well as a suggested description to help your team understand what each property is for.
To keep things organized, I highly recommend creating a new property group for all of these and storing them together like so:
Step 2: Setting Up Your Forecasting Pipeline & Supporting Workflows
Forecast Pipeline
- Duplicate your original pipeline, ensuring that you have the same stages and forecast probabilities set up. HubSpot, unfortunately, does not give you the ability to clone sales pipelines so you will need to do this manually.
- Update the "Editing Access" for each stage to "Limited to super admins". This prevents other users from editing the automated deals and potentially causing issues with reports.
Take note of the ID for each stage in this new pipeline. We will need it for workflow number 3 below.
Workflows
The workflows below fulfil a number of data entry tasks to help with the automatic deal creation in step 3 and keep data consistent across both the original and forecasting pipelines. Again, try to keep all of these workflows within the same folder.
If you're having trouble seeing the workflow images in the tabs below, click on the images to open them in a new window or right-click to save them to your computer. That should make it easier to zoom in and see the text.
1. Fill "Number of MRR Invoices"
Type: Deal
Description: Reformats "Time Between MRR Start and End" calculated field (stored as milliseconds in the backend) into the exact number of invoices that will be sent out for the project.
Re-enrollment: On
✅ The time Between MRR Start and End is known
✅ Time Between MRR Start and End is unknown
Format Data Settings
2. Fill in unknown forecasting amounts with 0
Type: Deal
Description: Fills all unknown forecasting amount fields with a "0". This is used to enable the automatic deal Amount calculation.
Re-enrollment: On
✅ MRR Amount is unknown
✅ One-Off Payment 1 Amount is unknown
✅ One-Off Payment 2 Amount is unknown
✅ One-Off Payment 3 Amount is unknown
3. Update Deal Amount + Matching Stage ID
Type: Deal
Description: Calculates the total deal amount from the forecasting amount properties and inputs it into the "Amount" field. Also adds the correct Forecast Pipeline stage ID to match the stages between the two pipelines, then enrols the deal in the "4. Create Forecast Pipeline Deals" workflow.
Re-enrollment: On
✅ Deal stage is known
✅ One-Off Payment 1 Amount is known
✅ One-Off Payment 2 Amount is known
✅ One-Off Payment 3 Amount is known
✅ One-Off Payment 1 Date is known
✅ One-Off Payment 2 Date is known
✅ One-Off Payment 3 Date is known
✅ MRR Amount is known
✅ Number of MRR Invoices is known
NOTE: Please update the If/then branch based on your own deal stages, and add your own matching internal IDs from the Forecasting Pipeline.
4. Create Forecast Pipeline Deals
Type: Deal
Description: Creates forecast deals in the Forecasting Pipeline after workflows 1-3 have completed their data entry actions. Deals are manually enrolled here after completing workflow 3.
Re-enrollment: On
Only for manually enrolled deals.
5. Adjusting Close Dates of Recurring Deals
Type: Deal
Description: Updates the close dates of each MRR deal based on which month they should occur.
Re-enrollment: On
✅ MRR Month is greater than 1
Format Data Settings
Step 5: Creating Revenue Goals & Dashboard Reports for Forecasting
Now that your recurring deals and one-off payments are properly automated in your forecasting pipeline, it's now time to set up your revenue goals. You can set it up as an individual or team goal and it should work the same way as it does on the original pipeline. You should also now be able to set notifications for the status of your goals.
When you create a revenue report for the forecast pipeline, you can select "Show revenue goals" in the "Display options" while customizing. The revenue goal value line will adjust based on the deal owner or HubSpot filtered in the report.
