Software Sector Business Information Model

This Business Information Model maps the data entities behind a software or SaaS business — customers, products, subscriptions, and usage — organized into foundational, transactional, and informational categories. It sets out how those entities relate across the contract, entitlement, and usage lifecycle, and it's delivered as an editable Word document you can adapt to your own product and go-to-market structure.

Why Subscriptions, Entitlements, and Usage Pull Apart

Software looks like a natural fit for a customer/product/order template, and that's exactly where it misleads you, because what a customer is billed for, entitled to use, and actually consuming are three separate entities that drift apart in practice. A single contract can bundle several products or modules with different entitlement terms, so entitlement, subscription, and usage need to be modeled as distinct entities that reconcile against each other, not one collapsed purchase record. Multi-tenancy adds a relationship most generic models never anticipate: one customer account can run multiple environments or tenants, each independently versioned and licensed, while one deployment can serve several business units under a single master agreement. Renewals and upgrades aren't new transactions against a static subscription — they're a linked chain of contract terms with proration and version history, which calls for an explicit subscription-history entity rather than a flat order table. And channel-sold deals split the customer relationship from the billing relationship entirely, since the partner is invoiced while the end customer holds the entitlement.

What You Get

• Foundational entities — Customer, Product/SKU, Contract, Tenant/Environment, Partner/Channel
• Transactional entities — Subscription, Order Line, Usage/Consumption, Renewal, Support Case
• Informational entities — Entitlement, Subscription History, License Utilization, Revenue Recognition
• Entity relationships connecting contract, entitlement, and usage data
• Delivered as an editable Word document

How Teams Use It

• Scoping data models for CRM, billing, or usage-metering system implementations
• Aligning product, finance, and customer success teams on shared definitions of subscription, entitlement, and usage before an integration project
• Structuring master data for customers and tenants across direct and channel-sold business
• Mapping renewal and consumption data requirements ahead of a billing platform migration

Who It's For

Data architects and business architects at software and SaaS companies, IT leaders scoping CRM or billing platforms, and product or revenue operations leaders standardizing subscription and usage data.