Smart Preview in Zuora CPQ
Smart Preview is a performance optimization feature in Zuora CPQ that reduces unnecessary preview calls to Zuora Billing. When no billing-impacting changes are detected, Zuora CPQ skips the Orders Preview API call and reuses previously calculated preview metrics.
Smart Preview improves performance for complex quotes by evaluating whether a new preview call is required after a quote update in Quote Studio. If the serialized billing preview payload has not changed in a meaningful way, the preview call is skipped.
Availability
Smart Preview is available from Quotes version 10.46. In versions 10.46 through 10.50, enablement requires assistance from Zuora Support. From Quotes version 10.51, Smart Preview is enabled automatically.
How Smart Preview works
When a user updates a quote and triggers preview in Quote Studio, Zuora CPQ checks whether the change affects billing or pricing. If billing-impacting changes are detected, a new Orders Preview API call is executed. If no billing-impacting changes are detected, the preview call is skipped and the existing preview metrics are reused.
Meaningful changes
A meaningful change is any update that modifies the serialized billing preview payload. This includes changes to pricing, charges, billing-impacting fields, and request parameters. UI-only changes that do not alter the serialized request data are not treated as meaningful changes.
Performance benefits
Smart Preview can reduce preview API calls, improve responsiveness for complex quotes, lower API rate limit consumption, and reduce load on downstream billing systems. These benefits are most noticeable for large quotes and quotes with frequent UI recalculations.
For field sets that affect the billing preview payload, see Objects and fieldsets for custom fields.
For steps to verify whether Smart Preview skipped the preview API call, see Validate Smart Preview API call skips.
For Smart Preview behavior, storage, observability, and constraints, see Smart Preview behavior and constraints.