The Nextian Product Catalog extends the standard Salesforce product catalog (Product2, Price Book, and other objects) to support quoting, ordering, management and billing of cloud and communications services.
Pricing is managed at the Price Book Entry (PBE) level, which is a custom object provided by Nextian. Each PBE contains all information required for quoting, including:
- Request type (e.g., New Service, Add-On Change, Disconnect, Re-Term, etc.)
- Term-based pricing options (e.g., an IP /29 Block may have different prices for 12-month vs. 24-month terms)
While Nextian parts have their own PBEs with term-based pricing, the service contract term is always driven by the top-level product.
Click here for more information about Nextian product catalog structure.
Nextian Billing Integration for Salesforce has been designed with the assumption that the Master Product Catalog resides in billing and the Salesforce product catalog pulls product and pricing information from billing.
However, since the Nextian product catalog includes information not present in the billing system — such as work order templates, service templates, and change entries — the catalog in Salesforce must be enriched with additional information.
A typical integration flow between the two catalogs (assuming the billing catalog is already configured) looks as follows:
- Initial Synchronization. Perform initial synchronization of the product catalogs.
- Enrichment. Enrich resulting products and their price book entries with information required by Nextian.
- Continuous Updates. Continuously update the Salesforce catalog, treating the billing system as the master source of information.
