This is the first blog on Quote Calculation sequence. We will cover the following in this blog:

• Difference between Salesforce Pricing Waterfall and Quote Calculation sequence.
• What is Quote Calculation sequence?
• Legacy and Advance Calculators and differences between them

In Part 2 of this series we will look at the details of Quote Calculation Sequence:

Salesforce CPQ Quote Calculation sequence is a technical topic and in order to tackle this in this series I would like to start with its comparison with Salesforce CPQ Price Waterfall which is functional in nature. This article assumes that you are a practicing Salesforce CPQ consultant, or you have some understanding of Sales CPQ and Price Waterfall.

Difference between Salesforce Pricing Waterfall and Quote Calculation sequence:

To understand the difference between Price waterfall and Quote Calculation Sequence, Let’s think about a Car which has a fixed route from Station A to Station E (Final Destination) and on the route it has to drive through Stations B, C and D. The drive from Station A to E describes the CPQ Price waterfall. Station A equated to List Price and E to Net Price. The arrival of Net Price must generally pass through Regular Price, Customer Price and Channel prices which can be equated to stations B, D and E.

Quote calculation sequence describes the internal working of the Car to cover this Journey. The driver of the car needs to know a good amount about the internal mechanism of the Car to drive safely and successfully. Similarly, a CPQ pricing consultant/developer must know the Quote calculation sequence and internal working of quote t3o be able to design a good pricing solution.

If you want to know more about CPQ Pricing Waterfall, I have written multiple blogs and you can start reading them here.

What is quote Calculation sequence?

Quote calculations sequence is the internal order in which Salesforce Pricing engine processes the quote and quote lines. For example, if a Tango Foods Sales Rep is processing a quote and entering a quote line, Quote calculation sequence controls the following:

• When the price is calculated and reflected to the user
• How are the additions and deletions of quote lines treated while pricing?
• When is the price calculated on the quote line?
• Which fields trigger the price calculation trigger automatically
• Can other fields on the quote line be added to trigger the calculation automatically?
• If a quote line is to be inserted dynamically, then how and when should it be inserted?
• If the quantity of a certain product in a quote line is to be calculated dynamically then how should it be configured. Should it be configured via workflow or process builder or through Price Rules?
• When does the recalculation of the quote line trigger?
• Control of the real time calculation of the price on the quote
• Most importantly quote calculation deals with the quote calculation stages like initialization, first, second and third and final rounds of calculation

CPQ Quote Calculators and differences between them

A calculation is a device or an application which calculates numbers based on addition, subtraction multiplications, division and other rules and functions.  Similarly, a quote price calculator is the heart or the pricing engine of the quote. In order to calculate, the quote calculator must go through a series of steps in a particular order to give the desired calculation. This order and sequence can also be called as the Quote Calculation Sequence.

Salesforce CPQ has calculators and in order to understand the Quote calculation sequence, it is imperative to know about calculators and how they are used.

Salesforce CPQ has evolved over a period and so has its pricing calculators. There are 2 types of CPQ calculators:

• Legacy Calculator: This was the only choice till about 2016. It can still be used and is available as an option, but Salesforce does not support any new features and development on it.

• Advance Calculator: This was introduced in 2016 and is now the default calculator in all Salesforce CPQ implementations. However, users do have the option to use Legacy Calculator. Guidelines to migrate to Advance calculator can be accessed from here.

Difference between the Advance and Legacy Quote Calculators

• Legacy Calculator runs applications in Apex. This involves server-side programming in order to add custom pricing logic in the quotes.
• Uses standard salesforce automation line workflow and process builder to update field values in quote line and add quote lines.
• Advance Calculator runs in Heroku and JavaScript to perform calculations. The calculation becomes more client side and hence faster.
• Advance calculator uses Price rules to add field values and quote lines during calculation. Salesforce does not recommend using Process Builder and Workflow with Advance Calculator.
• With Advance Calculator Quote line data exists in memory and hence faster calculations.
• Advance calculator uses JSQCP (Java Script Quote Calculator Plugin) to write complex pricing logic which cannot be achieved by Price Rules

I hope this is a decent introduction to Salesforce CPQ Quote Calculation sequence. Your comments, shares and likes will motivate me to write.