NEIL PARKHURST

As I prepare for the MB2-713 certification (Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2016 Sales) I am publishing my revision notes in the hope that they may be beneficial to others preparing for the exam.

My last few posts have concentrated on sales order processing looking at how an opportunity results in a quote and then how the quote can turn into an order. In this post I will finish this process by looking at the final step of invoicing.

What is an invoice? Typically, you can simply think of an invoice as a request for payment. Often invoices will be created from fulfilled orders. However, like all of the transactional records in the sales process you can also generate an invoice directly without the need of an order.

In my experience it is quite common for companies to skip the invoice creation step in CRM. Why? Well, the reason is that CRM is not designed to be a full accounting system. In some circumstances it might be appropriate to generate the invoices in CRM but then integrate those records into an ERP / accounting package. (Such as Dynamics AX.)

Invoices, like quotes and orders have multiple states,

• Active, all invoices will start off in an open state. Active invoices initially have a status reason of “New”. Active invoices can be maintained. The status reason (out of the box) has several options at this stage. These can be used to reflect the current state of the active invoice. Obviously these can be customized as required.
  • Partially Shipped
  • Billed
  • Booked (Applies to services)
  • Installed (Applies to services)
• Cancelled, active and paid invoices can be cancelled. Out of the box only one status reason of canceled is available at this point. Canceled invoices become read only and cannot be re-opened.
• Paid, paid invoices can have one of two status reasons. Paid, completed and paid partial. Once flagged as paid (partial or completed) the invoice becomes read only.

As with the other transactional records invoices can be created manually. When this is done the full details would need to be entered. Including price list, currency, product lines, discounts and so on.

Or an invoice can be automatically created from a sales order. When an invoice is automatically created from an order the invoice value will be for the total order value. It is however worth knowing that each order could be related to multiple invoices. Maybe a staged payment is involved etc. However to implement this process either the invoice values would need to be adjusted manually or customizations created to reflect the processes specific to each business.

Pricing Options

As with orders you can use the USE CURRENT PRICING option to refresh the prices on the invoice. Setting them to the ones in the current price list. We might expect this to be used infrequently as in most organisations the price on the order will be the price invoiced.

Again like orders, it is possible to lock prices so no further changes will impact the invoice total.

The invoice total is updated when the invoice is saved or you can use the RECALCULATE button to force the totals to be refreshed.

Paid Invoice

Selecting the INVOICE PAID option will trigger the dialog shown below. Once OK is selected the invoice will become read only.

Note:
Even a paid invoice can be cancelled. You might do this very rarely but it could be useful if the invoice was created in error.

Cancel Invoice

Selecting the CANCEL INVOICE option will give the following dialog. Out of the box the only status reasons is “canceled”. It might be that each organisation will want to customization this, may cancelled reasons might include “Company no longer trading”, “Created in Error”, etc.

Invoice Numbering

Each invoice (and quote / order) is given a unique ID. This is generated by the system when the invoice is first created. The prefix used and length of the number can be controlled. You will find an auto-numbering configuration option in settings / administration.

Links

If the full sales cycle is following using Dynamics CRM one benefit is that all of the transaction reords are linked. Below you can see that from my invoice I can quickly access the order or even opportunity related to the invoice.

I hope this post has built on my earlier posts regarding quotes and orders, and hopefully it has helped with your revision for the MB2-713 exam. J