NEIL PARKHURST

MB2-713 is Microsoft’s Dynamics CRM 2016 Sales certification as I prepare for the exam I’m publishing posts covering all aspects of my revision. This time I’ll be looking at sales order processing.

Sales order processing within Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2016 is designed to allow companies to create and track sales in a consistent and measurable manner. This is done by making use of entities such as opportunity, quote, order and invoice. In earlier posts I have already described the process of capturing leads and converting to opportunities and creation / maintenance of the product catalog. (Including price lists.) I am now going to build on that information by looking at how the sales related transactional records operate in more detail. Starting with how to add and amend line items.

Addition of “items” to opportunities

Opportunities can contain a mixture of exiting products and write-in products. I haven’t mentioned write-in products previously; these are essentially free-typed items. Useful for one off / ad-hoc deals. I will cover write-in products in more detail later in this post.

Before adding any existing or write-in products to an opportunity we need to select a price list and then decide if the revenue should be User Defined or System Calculated. This field has implications on records created later for quotations, orders and invoices.

Selecting system calculated means that the estimated revenue on the opportunity will be calculated using the selected currency, price list and product. Meaning the system is going to lookup the prices. The estimated revenue price is reading only and only based on the products / services added to the opportunity. With a system calculated value it is essential a price list and currency are defined on the opportunity. (Even when using write-in products!)

The second (and default) option is User Define pricing. This is useful when the sales person doesn’t yet know the exact products to include on the opportunity. Or maybe the organisation in question operates a very simple sales process not making use of the product catalog. In these scenarios the estimated revenue field is manually entered. To simply set the estimated revenue a price list isn’t mandatory.

Write-In Products

As already mentioned write-in products are ones that are manually entered and don’t have to be added to the product catalog. Say you normally sell caravans, you’d have a price list for caravans and all the related camping equipment you routinely supply. But say a “left of field” opportunity arises when you can off load some old office equipment. You are unlikely to create a price list for this situation and therefore write-in products would come into play. Write-in products may also be routinely used by companies who don’t really have a defined set of products, maybe all of the deals are for custom / bespoke items. An antiques shop for example might mainly use write-in products as each item they have in stock is unique.

As products are added to the opportunity you can select their type, write-in or existing. If write-in is selected the first thing that will happen is you will be prompted to enter a description of the item. And then a unit price, quantity and discount.

You can see below that I have added the sale of two desks onto my opportunity for a BBQ grill and a caravan. Notice that the icon on the left hand side is different for the write-in product. Also notice that the product name and pricing fields don’t have the lock symbol as they can be changed. And that no suggestions are available for write-in products. The one-off nature of write-in products dictates that they would have product properties or suggestions.

Tip:
It is IMPOSSIBLE to add line items without a price list. Even though write-in products don’t derive their price from the price list one is required.

Write in products can be useful for including negative values. For example, if you wanted to give a fixed value discount or credit to the order as a whole. (Without needing to split the discount across all the items on the opportunity.

Currencies and Exchange Rates

In earlier posts I have already mentioned currencies and how they affect price lists and price list items. Currencies are associated with opportunities, quotes, orders, invoices and price lists. Each one can only be associated with one currency. So, for example, if you trade in dollars and pounds sterling you will need two price lists. One for each currency.

Exchange rates change frequently! And as already discussed are changed manually as required. But when do these changes impact the calculated currency values? …

1. The record is created.
2. Whenever a money field is change. (As the current exchange rate will be applied.)
3. The state of the record changes. (For example when an open opportunity is marked as won.)

I hope this post has helped with your revision for the MB2-713 exam. Next time I will continue this series by looking at quotes.
J