# Pipedrive recurring products vs installments: choose before the first deal

https://salesbond.app/blog/pipedrive-recurring-products-vs-installments/
Published: 2026-10-03 · Updated: 2026-10-26

An installment splits a one-time payment into dated parts and gives you two numbers, ACV and TCV. A recurring product gives you those two plus MRR and ARR. And on a single Pipedrive deal you pick one of the two up front: installments can’t be added to deals with recurring products ( [Pipedrive: recurring products and installments](https://support.pipedrive.com/en/article/recurring-products)). That is the whole decision, and it is cheaper to make it before the first deal than after the fortieth.

This article is about that setup choice and the limits around it. If you are still deciding which number counts as “the deal” in your forecast, we covered that in [ACV vs deal value in Pipedrive](https://salesbond.app/blog/acv-vs-deal-value-pipedrive/); here we stay on the product settings.

## A deal worth “12,000”: one payment, or twelve?

Picture a rep, call her Marta, closing a 12,000 package with a freight company this week. The name and the numbers are made up; the mechanics are not. The customer is happy to pay. The question nobody asked at the kickoff is how.

Here are three ways that same 12,000 can enter Pipedrive, and what each one produces.

**Subscription.** Marta adds a recurring product at 1,000 a month, twelve billing cycles, first bill on Sunday, November 1, 2026. The twelfth and last cycle falls on Friday, October 1, 2027. Pipedrive calculates MRR 1,000, ARR 12,000, ACV 12,000 and TCV 12,000.

**Project [paid in parts](https://salesbond.app/blog/pipedrive-won-not-paid-prepayment-invoice/).** Marta adds a one-time implementation product at 12,000 and splits it 40 / 30 / 30: 4,800 on Monday, January 18, 2027, then 3,600 on Monday, April 19, and 3,600 on Monday, July 19. The deal shows ACV 12,000 and TCV 12,000. No MRR, no ARR, because nothing recurs.

**Setup fee plus subscription.** The contract says 3,000 for setup, paid in parts, plus 750 a month for twelve months. Add 9,000 of subscription and 3,000 of setup and you are back at 12,000. But this shape doesn’t fit on one deal. Installments only apply to non-recurring products, and the subscription is recurring. So it becomes two deals: one with the 750-a-month recurring product (MRR 750, ARR 9,000), one with the 3,000 setup split into installments.

Same money, three different shapes in the forecast. Pick the shape first.

## Recurring products in Pipedrive: what gets calculated, and the cycle limits

Recurring products exist to track subscription revenue, and they calculate four values: MRR, ARR, ACV and TCV ( [Pipedrive: recurring products and installments](https://support.pipedrive.com/en/article/recurring-products)). The feature is available on Growth and higher plans, and the product has to exist in the Products catalog before you can attach it to a deal. If your team is on HubSpot instead, the same choice looks different: which of [MRR, ARR or Amount on a HubSpot deal](https://salesbond.app/blog/hubspot-arr-mrr-deal-amount/) goes into the forecast.

The setup itself is short. In the deal detail view click “+ Products”, pick the product, choose a billing frequency such as monthly or annually, then decide whether it renews until cancelled or runs for a fixed number of cycles. The fixed option tops out at 208 cycles. Set the billing start date, tax and any discount, click “Revenue” if you want to preview the schedule, and save. For a mid-term add-on, [a stub-period add-on with a fixed number of cycles](https://salesbond.app/blog/co-terming-add-ons-pipedrive/) keeps it in step with the main contract.

Two things in that flow decide what your reports will say later.

The first is “renews until cancelled” versus a fixed term. For a product with infinite cycles, Pipedrive calculates MRR and ARR on an assumed 12-month term. So an open-ended 1,000-a-month subscription and a twelve-cycle one show the same MRR 1,000 and ARR 12,000. Now make it 24 cycles. MRR is still 1,000, ARR still 12,000, ACV still 12,000 because it covers twelve months. TCV doubles to 24,000. If your team compares deals by TCV, the term you type in is the forecast.

The second is the start date. Revenue in the product revenue forecast report in Insights is placed by billing cycle and billing date. A subscription that starts on the first of next month and one that starts on signature show the same ACV and TCV, and very different months in that report.

A quick reference, because the four terms get mixed up on sales calls:

| Term | Pipedrive’s definition | Recurring products | Installments |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| MRR | Monthly revenue expected from recurring products | yes | no |
| ARR | Annual revenue expected from recurring products | yes | no |
| ACV | Total value of the deal for 12 months | yes | yes |
| TCV | Total value of the deal over the full term | yes | yes |

Source for the definitions and the yes/no columns: [Pipedrive: recurring products and installments](https://support.pipedrive.com/en/article/recurring-products). Note that ACV here is the field Pipedrive calculates, so one-time amounts billed within twelve months count toward it. That is why Marta’s 40 / 30 / 30 project shows ACV 12,000. It is a different thing from the recurring-only ACV in our [ACV vs deal value](https://salesbond.app/blog/acv-vs-deal-value-pipedrive/) piece.

## Installments: ACV and TCV only, up to 36

Installments are for a one-time sale the customer pays in parts. They do not create recurring revenue, so the deal gets ACV and TCV and nothing else.

To add them: open the deal, click “+ Products”, pick a product and enter its price if the catalog has none. Then go to the installments section and click “+ Add installment”. Each installment has a description, a billing date and an amount, and the total of all installments is shown at the bottom of the list before you save. The ceiling is 36 installments per deal ( [Pipedrive: recurring products and installments](https://support.pipedrive.com/en/article/recurring-products)).

Thirty-six is plenty for a project. It is not a substitute for a subscription. A team that “subscribes” customers by typing 36 monthly installments gets a deal with no MRR, no ARR, and a schedule that has to be rebuilt by hand when the customer renews. If the money repeats use a recurring product.

The description field on each installment is worth filling. “Milestone 2: data migration signed off” tells finance what triggers the invoice. “Payment 2” tells them nothing. Our take: write the trigger, not the number.

## The one-or-the-other rule and the formula-field gap

![Decision diagram: installments need a one-time product; a recurring product disables them, so mixed contracts become two deals](https://salesbond.app/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/pipedrive-recurring-products-vs-installments-2.png)

Pipedrive names two reasons the installments tab is greyed out: there is no one-time product on the deal, or there is a recurring product on it ( [Pipedrive: recurring products and installments](https://support.pipedrive.com/en/article/recurring-products)). The second one is the rule that bites small teams. The moment a contract has a subscription and a fee paid in dated parts, one deal can’t hold both: keep the subscription and drop the schedule, or split the work into two deals.

We would split it. One deal for the implementation with installments, one deal for the subscription. Two deals cost a minute of of admin. One deal with a payment schedule kept in a note costs a surprise every quarter when finance asks what was actually due.

Three more limits from the same help pages:

1. Products on one deal share one currency. USD or CAD, not both ( [Pipedrive: how can I link products to a deal](https://support.pipedrive.com/en/article/how-can-i-link-products-to-a-deal) ). A subscription priced in euros and a setup fee in dollars means two deals, and the totals question is it’s own topic: [multiple currencies and deal totals in Pipedrive](https://salesbond.app/blog/pipedrive-multiple-currencies-totals/).
2. Tax is manual, and the choice changes the number people see. Take an illustrative 20% rate. With “Tax exclusive”, 12,000 shows a total of 14,400. With “Tax inclusive”, the total stays 12,000 and 2,000 of it is tax. “No tax” adds nothing. Pick one setting per catalog and write it down, otherwise the same package will show two different totals on two reps’ deals.
3. MRR, ARR, ACV and TCV are not available in formula fields and cannot be calculated through other field types ( [Pipedrive: recurring products and installments](https://support.pipedrive.com/en/article/recurring-products) ). This is the one that surprises people who read our [weighted pipeline forecast](https://salesbond.app/blog/weighted-pipeline-forecast/) piece and want “ACV × probability” as a column. You cannot build it as a formula field. A 60% deal with TCV 24,000 and ACV 12,000 weighs 14,400 on one basis and 7,200 on the other, and that multiplication happens in an export, in Insights, or in a tool that reads the fields, not inside Pipedrive’s field editor.

The price you set in the deal is also local to that deal. It defaults from the product card, you can change it in the add-products window, and the change is not written back to the catalog ( [Pipedrive: how can I link products to a deal](https://support.pipedrive.com/en/article/how-can-i-link-products-to-a-deal)). Good for one-off discounts. Bad if a rep “fixes” the price on twenty deals and the catalog still says the old number. Discounts deserve a policy, and we wrote one up in [a discount policy for sales teams](https://salesbond.app/blog/discount-policy-sales-teams/).

## A setup rule for a small team on Growth and higher

A written rule, agreed before the pipeline fills, beats any cleanup later. Here is the one we would hand a team of five on a Growth or higher plan.

If the customer pays the same amount on a repeating schedule, it is a recurring product. Set the real term: twelve cycles if the contract says twelve months, not “until cancelled”, because the TCV your manager reads is the term you typed. Set the billing start date to the first invoice date, not the signature date.

If the customer pays once and you let them pay in parts, it is a one-time product with installments. Describe the trigger on every installment.

If a contract has both, open two deals and link them to the same organization. Name them so they sort together. Phased contracts are a third case: separate [phase deals in Pipedrive](https://salesbond.app/blog/phased-rollout-deal-pipedrive/) rather than one deal with a long schedule.

One currency per deal. One tax setting per catalog, documented. Catalog price is the list price; deal price is the agreed price; nobody edits teh catalog to match a single deal.

And when the forecast meeting asks for a weighted number on ACV or TCV, remember that this is not a Pipedrive field you can create. It lives in Insights, in an export, or in something that reads the deal. We build SalesBond, a sales management layer on top of the CRM a team already uses; we started with Pipedrive. Anything that reads your pipeline later, SalesBond included, can only work with the product and value fields your reps actually filled in, which is exactly why a rule like the one above has to exist before the data does. If you want to see what your current deals look like against it, [check your CRM with SalesBond](https://salesbond.app/).

Marta’s 12,000 deal is fine either way. The team that has forty of them, half as subscriptions and half as 36-installment “subscriptions”, is not, and the fix at that point is a weekend of re-entering products. Decide the shape today. Our longer notes on where that number then goes are in [sales forecasting methods for a small team](https://salesbond.app/blog/sales-forecasting-methods-small-team/).