Physical inventory represents the inventory of tangible products that are available to customers such as wireless handsets, servers, customer premise equipment (CPE), or many other products.

Physical inventory is critical to enterprise clients, including telecommunications (handsets, CPE, ports, etc.), infrastructure as a service (cages, racks, servers, etc.), and any company that requires a physical device to deliver the product or service (such as a GPS unit, time clock, or set-top box).

A best practice regarding physical inventory and the Q2C process is for the system to ensure that when a customer receives a quote for physical products, the corresponding products are available in inventory to be fulfilled. Those units must be reserved for the customer.

When the products are not available during the selling process, it frustrates customers and puts entire deals at risk.

Logical inventory represents the non-physical assets a company owns, such as phone numbers or IP addresses, which are crucial to tracking a product or service. These items aren’t physically stored in a warehouse or data center.

Logical inventory is a key requirement in the enterprise space such as with telecommunications and infrastructure as a service.

Professional services automation, along with the closely related project and portfolio management (PPM), can be software applications or groups of applications that track project metrics such as time recording, billing, reporting, and utilization. The primary purpose of these applications is support and tracking of the company's operational aspects for implementation of their solutions. In short, these solutions monitor implementation, engineering, or product teams.

This allows the provider to gather metrics and data to improve efficiency and decrease costs, labor, and time-to-service for customers.

Workflow management (not to be confused with workflow management applications) is the process of coordinating the employees and contractors who deliver service to a customer in the field. This can be done at a customer location, or within some segment of the network used to deliver service to a customer.

An excellent example of this is typically B2B telecommunications or B2C cable TV activation, where an engineer or network technician needs to be on-site (colloquially called a truck roll) to activate a service.

In the Quote to Cash realm, the term provision is used to describe the activation of products and services that are digital or network-oriented. When a company turns on cable, internet service, or Netflix, they are provisioning their service.

It should also be noted that provisioning is tightly aligned with a company’s billing system, its usage processing, and is often a trigger in the revenue recognition or financial management system that earned revenue is realized.

Fulfillment is to physical inventory what provisioning is to logical inventory. Specifically, fulfillment is the exchange of a physical product. Regardless of whether the product was picked up from a company retail location, delivered by a field technician, or received via a shipment, it should be treated as a separate, independent line item in a company's billing and revenue recognition systems when the physical inventory and the logical inventory are not delivered in parallel.