Forecasting Usage-Based Revenue is Hard. Here’s a Better Way.

If you’re in SaaS, fintech, or media, you’ve probably run into this problem: your revenue doesn’t follow a clean monthly schedule. It depends on what customers use. And that usage changes all the time.

That makes forecasting a mess.

Most CRMs aren’t built for this. They’re good at tracking deals. Not at showing how revenue will actually land. So your team ends up guessing. Finance gets nervous. And no one really trusts the numbers.

Let’s talk about what’s broken, and what can help.

The problem with usage data in Salesforce

Salesforce works well for standard opportunities. You close a deal. You book the amount. Everyone moves on.

But usage revenue doesn’t work like that.

Let’s say a customer signs a $100K contract. Only half of that is committed. The rest depends on how much they use your platform. It could be more. It could be less.

Where do you track that in Salesforce? You could use custom fields. Or build reports outside the system. But none of that really solves the core issue: your CRM doesn’t think in patterns. It only thinks in deals.

Guesswork doesn’t scale

You can get by with spreadsheets for a while. Maybe your RevOps team builds models in Excel. They chase down delivery teams for updates. They ask Sales to guess usage next quarter.

But this falls apart fast.

The bigger you grow, the harder it gets to manage. Revenue starts slipping through the cracks. You over-forecast. Or under-forecast. Finance builds their own models. Then the whole company starts running on different numbers.

That’s when things break down.

What a good usage forecast looks like

You need something better. Not more spreadsheets. Not more guesswork.

A solid usage forecast should:

• Live inside Salesforce.
• Show actual revenue timing, not just bookings.
• Update when usage trends change.
• Work across products, plans, and customers.

That’s what revVana is built to do.

How revVana helps

revVana brings usage forecasting into Salesforce. It lets you build patterns based on usage, delivery, or consumption, then tie those patterns to your opportunities or accounts.

So when Sales closes a usage-based deal, revVana helps you spread that revenue over time. Based on what you’ve seen before. Or what you expect to happen.

And when things change, like if usage spikes or drops, you can update your forecast without rebuilding everything from scratch.

No more “bookings ≠ revenue” confusion

RevOps teams are stuck between Sales and Finance. They know the numbers don’t add up, but they don’t always have the tools to fix it.

revVana gives them that control. It closes the gap between what Sales sells and what Finance needs to plan. And it gives everyone a clearer view of what’s coming in.

If your revenue depends on usage, you can’t keep treating it like fixed bookings. You need a way to model real behavior, inside the tools your team already uses.

That’s what revVana does. And that’s how you fix forecasting.