DECISIONLOG.md

Decision Log

Track Zuora transactions utilizing the zuora__biling_history and zuora__revenue_line_item_history models

To track Zuora transactions and various charges, it was determined there are two levels that will be most helpful to the end user

• Pulling Zuora data at the invoice level to understand the history of invoice, payments, taxes, discounts, and credit balance adjustments. That information can be found in the billing history model.
• Pulling Zuora data at the invoice item level to associate these transaction types with various products, rate plans, and rate plan charges. This information can be found in the line item history model.

Evaluate Zuora monthly recurring revenue at the account or the charge level with the zuora__monthly_recurring_revenue and zuora__line_item_history models respectively.

Zuora customers can utilize the zuora__monthly_recurring_revenue model to make MRR calculations at the account level. If Zuora customers would like to dig deeper, they can utilize the zuora__line_item_history model using invoice_item_id as the lowest grain and then aggregating by various charge fields. They'll have gross_revenue, discount_revenue, net_revenue measures available to them for finding MRR at the charge level. We also have mrr_expected_current_month and mrr_expected_home_currency_current_month fields from rate_plan_charge that are expected MRR values but might not necessarily be the actual MRR billed out, so it's brought in for comparison.

Zuora amount distinctions between monthly recurring revenue and billing history

You might notice discrepancies between the zuora__monthly_recurring_revenue monthly totals and zuora__account_daily_overview amounts.

• This is because zuora__monthly_recurring_revenue looks at the service_start_month grain for when to evaluate revenue totals since revenue usually bills out at the start of a subscription service.
• On the other side, zuora__account_daily_overview is looking at a history of billings, so we use the invoice_date grain, since that is usually when an account gets billed out.

We felt this made the most sense for each of these models in billing and revenue recognition, but we'd love to get your feedback on this approach in our Fivetran dbt community!

Use zuora__account_churn_analysis in our analysis folder to examine churn at the monthly level

Customers can evaluate churn at numerous levels. In Zuora, the general glossary evaluation of churn is at the account level and examining whether rate plan charges recur at the monthly level. We evaluate churn in the zuora__account_churn_analysis model in the analysis folder using this method, where you can utilize this compiled code to calculate churn more effectively.

To slice general churn by various grains like subscription, rate plan charges, products, utilize the zuora__line_item_history and zuora__subscription_overview models to gather the needed information to calculate churn. You can use charge date values to compile the necessary billing periods.