One of the largest areas of recent growth at Salesforce has been the Salesforce CPQ and Salesforce Billing product lines. At Dreamforce 2019 we announced Chargent Gateways Connector for Salesforce Billing.  

One of the largest areas of growth at Salesforce in recent years has been in their Salesforce CPQ and Salesforce Billing product lines. Right now, many of you Chargent customers are already leveraging CPQ and Billing alongside Chargent.  

We recently announced our latest product, Chargent Gateways Connector for Salesforce Billing, this product we worked closely with the Salesforce product team to deliver here at Dreamforce 2019.  

We are often asked  “Isn’t Chargent a billing application? So isn’t Chargent a competitor to Salesforce billing?”  The simple answer is: Chargent is complementary to Billing, not competitive with it.  

This chart represents the feature differences between the product lines.  When we look at Salesforce CPQ and Billing you know they support things like: guided selling, the product configurator, pricing and quote proposal management, orders and renewals, then invoice management.

We support subscription payments so kind of a simple easy to bill model, regular period payments.  We also support retail payment so we have a point of sale system ready to go and so you know we like to think about it like we have focused heavily on you know we have we have focused our products heavily on actually taking payments and of course that has some overlap and of course that does touch a little bit on billing that’s impossible to completely separate to look.

A big area where it was really obvious to folks that Chargent could help Salesforce CPQ customers is that we support over 30 different payment gateways connected to the Salesforce platform.

You can see that we do have overlap with billing including: PayPal’s PayFlow Pro, Cybersource and Authorize.net.  The other 28 gateways you see on the slide are not covered by Salesforce Billing and there’s no good reason to believe Salesforce will eventually support these, it is quite a full time job keeping all of these gateways up to date.

We were getting many requests from implementers, customers and eventually the Salesforce product team asking us to build a connector to our gateways.  Customers were saying that they wanted to keep their existing payment gateway provider which makes a lot of sense.

Of course, the first of these 3 approaches that we’re going to talk about is our latest innovation which is our first ever Chargent gateway connector.  Now when you use the Chargent gateway connector for Salesforce billing, you will keep using all of the the Salesforce Billing payment user interfaces you use today.  

This includes their virtual terminal, the hosted payments pages feature, the payment scheduling feature. In other words, if you’ve already integrated the Salesforce Billing UIs into your process, no changes will be needed, simply install our product, do the quick set up and you are good to go!

The next thing to think about is if you do need more of the Chargent feature set. You’d  integrate Chargent Orders. This has the advantage of being completely extensible meaning that you can develop any process you can imagine, and means you can payment enable every object inside salesforce.  If you have certain call center employees that take payments maybe on a case or maybe on an opportunity, then other users that need to be able to work inside of billing and do some more sophisticated things then working with our Chargent Orders package to do that is probably right for your organization.

The primary difference between these first two options is with gateway connector you are only using our gateway integrations, with the Chargent Orders model you have unlimited extension capabilities.

To tie this together. the first two options are primarily for e-commerce or what we know what we call a card-not-present solutions and then Chargent terminal and we’re talking about in person retail payments.

Chargent Terminal is a third option to take paymets from — via our Connector inside of Salesforce Billing, from anywhere else in Salesforce via Chargent and Chargent Orders, and in-person retail or event payments using Chargent Terminal. And all 3 of them centralize your payments data in one convenient place, Salesforce.

Salesforce Billing is a Salesforce add-on product that automates the entire billing process and focuses heavily on your invoice management. The product is incredibly detailed with how it helps businesses manage their invoice process. With Salesforce Billing you can easily take all the line items from an order and have them fully integrated into your invoices with just a few clicks!  In short, Salesforce Billing helps you figure out how much you need to get paid and when it needs to get paid. Salesforce Billing loves invoices and is actually quite good with them.