Revenue data model
The revenue data model is the set of objects, relationships and required fields that every revenue-facing process reads from and writes to.
The model defines what an account is, how contacts associate to it, how opportunities relate to contracts, how contracts relate to entitlements, and which fields are authoritative for each. It is the vocabulary the whole system speaks; every process built on top inherits its precision or its ambiguity.
Most revenue reporting problems that present as tooling problems are model problems. Account hierarchy that cannot represent a parent-subsidiary relationship, or a contact object with no buying-group concept, will defeat any analytics layer placed above it.
Where it breaks
Account hierarchy is unmodeled, so enterprise reporting is assembled by string-matching company names.
Related terms
- Metric definition
- A metric definition is the governed specification of a measure, its formula, source fields, filters, grain, owner and known limitations.
- System of record
- A system of record is the designated authoritative source for a given entity or field, the one place where, if two systems disagree, this one is right.
- Data quality
- Data quality is the measured fitness of records for the decisions made from them, completeness, accuracy, consistency, timeliness and uniqueness, each measured against a stated requirement.
- Field governance
- Field governance is the control over what fields exist, who may write to each, whether values are constrained, and what depends on them downstream.
Field notes on this
- You just inherited RevOps. Start with a charter.
Being told to "own revenue operations" is not a mandate. Until authority is written down, every decision you make is reversible by whoever objects loudest.
- Why four teams report four different revenue numbers
A reconciliation problem may be definitional, technical, or both. Test the metric contract before buying another data platform.