💡 A note on terminology: In this article, Revenue Cloud refers to both Salesforce CPQ and Agentforce Revenue Management (formerly RCA).
Why alignment matters
Before you're able to start comparing and deploying your Revenue Cloud (both CPQ and RCA) configuration between environments, it's important that you first get your Revenue Cloud config aligned in your environments. Having the building blocks in place before doing any additional Revenue Cloud development means you can easily track changes and avoid deploying duplicates.
This guide takes you through the process of introducing your Gearset External IDs in Production, and replicating them into your sandboxes via a refresh. If a sandbox refresh is not an option for you then you may need to use this method instead.
Running the external ID setup for your org(s) in Gearset
The first step is to run Gearset's External ID setup wizard on your Production org. These IDs help Gearset recognize the same record as it moves between different environments.
What happens during this step?
Metadata update: Gearset adds a new "External ID" field to your Revenue Cloud objects.
Data population: Gearset automatically fills that field with a unique ID based on the existing Salesforce record ID.
You can find the full guide on how to do this in our External ID setup documentation.
Aligning existing Revenue Cloud records via a full copy sandbox refresh and the Gearset external ID setup
The cleanest way to make sure your full copy sandbox and production org Revenue Cloud configuration are perfectly in sync and have the Gearset external ID, is via a full copy sandbox refresh, after having run the external ID setup on your production org first.
Note: The setup requires you to do a full copy sandbox refresh, so you should ensure that all necessary metadata and Revenue Cloud config that you care about from your full copy sandbox are in your production org before starting the process.
Step 1: Run the Gearset external ID setup on your Production org
Gearset will perform a metadata deployment to add its external ID field to Revenue Cloud and related standard Revenue Cloud objects, followed by a data deployment to populate its external ID field derived from the existing Salesforce record ID.
Step 2: Perform a full copy sandbox refresh to perfectly align it with production
Once the Gearset external ID has been successfully added and populated with the existing record IDs, you can now perform a full copy sandbox refresh. This will leave your Production and Full Copy Sandbox perfectly in sync.
Step 3: Deploy from dev to full copy sandboxes to production for better Revenue Cloud configuration deployments
You can seed existing Revenue Cloud config to your developer sandboxes or deploy new Revenue Cloud config to downstream environments. Gearset will automatically handle the population of existing record IDs for any new config at deployment time.
