I am revising for the MB2-713 certification (Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2016 Sales), as I prepare for my exam I’m publishing blog posts which I hope may help others.

This time I am going to look at orders. Previously I have covered creating a lead and progressing that to an opportunity, then I’ve looked at how to associate quotes to the opportunity. So now it makes sense to turn my attention to the next logical step in the process, orders.

An order is created when a customer confirms their purchase of a given product or service. (e.g. they accept a quote.) Orders can be created by “winning” quotes.

It is also possible to create an order without a quotation or even an opportunity. Out of the box, for example, the CRM navigation gives the ability to create opportunities from an account. But it is a simple customization to add quotes, orders and opportunities to the account’s navigation. This approach means it is easy to tailor CRM to match whatever sales cycle a particular company follows. The customization of CRM is beyond the scope of the MB2-713 exam, so it should be enough just to know this tailoring is possible.

Possible states for an order include;

• Active (open), orders start off with a status of active. At this point the status reason field initially starts as “New” but can be updated to “Pending”.
• Fulfilled, a fulfilled order can be marked as complete or partial. (Think of a fulfilled order as a delivered order.) Once the order has been fulfilled it becomes readonly.
• Canceled, an open or fulfilled order can have its state changed to cancelled. A cancelled order cannot be re-opened.

Note:
Invoices can be created against active and fulfilled orders.

Creating Orders

Orders can be created by marking a quotation as won or created directly without the need for an opportunity or a quote.

If the order is created from scratch then all of the fields such as price lists, products, currency (etc) found on the opportunity / quote will need to be entered.

Below you can see a quotation, on the quotation I have selected CREATE ORDER. A dialog is displayed that will confirm the details and at the same time mark the quote as won. In this example I created the quote directly from the customer account. Meaning no opportunity was involved. If my quote had been linked to an opportunity additional prompts would have been available in this dialog to optionally close the opportunity.

Clicking ok, will close the quotation as won, create an order and open the newly created order. Notice that the order form looks very similar to the quotation. Although there are some extra fields such as requested delivery date and date fulfilled.

Note: In my example I gave my quotation a poor name! As when the quotation is won the order will inherit this name. So calling it “A sample quote for a caravan” was not a great idea! A better name might have been “A sample caravan sale”.

Notice that my newly created order has a status of active and status reason of “new”. Out of the box I could change the status reason to “pending”. This might be used to illustrate that the order isn’t yet fulfilled (delivered) but it is being processed.

The pricing on the order will initially reflect the prices from the quotation. It might be that price increases have been applied since the quotation was created. In this circumstance you can select the USE CURRENT PRICING option to refresh the order prices based on the current price list item details. Other amendments can also be made to discounts at this point or additional products added. Once the pricing is considered final the LOCK PRICING option can then be used to fix them.

Tip:
Other amendments might be required at this point such as confirming ship to / bill to address details.

The RECALCULATE button is important, changes to line items on the order will not automatically be applied to the order total until the order is saved. Clicking the recalculate button will force the order total to be recalculated with saving the order.

Fulfill an Order

When an order is completed (i.e. delivered), the FULFILL ORDER button is used. Doing so will present a dialog similar to the one below. Clicking “Fulfill” will now change the order status to fulfilled and the status reason to complete. Also the order becomes read only at this point.

Cancel an Order

Cancelling an order is a very similar process to fulfilment! Except order status changes to Canceled. An order can be cancelled at any point, even after fulfilment. Once cancelled the order can not be re-opened.

Out of the box when cancelling an order, you only have option one status reason option “No Money”. A common customization will be to adjust the reasons here to provide options applicable to your organisation. For example: In some sales situations the customer has the right to a 14 day cooling off period. You might want a specific status reason for cancelling orders during the 14 day window.

Create Invoice

Before or after the order is fulfil the CREATE INVOICE button can be used to create and open the invoice. Invoices will be covered in a future post.

Dynamics AX, Dynamics GP or NAV. Why do I mention these in a Dynamics CRM post!! It is worth understanding that whilst Microsoft Dynamics CRM contains transactional elements such as orders and invoices it is not a full ERP system. AX, GP and NAV are Microsoft’s ERP platforms. Dynamics CRM does not provide any of the accounting and warehouse management features you’d expect in a full blown ERP solution. It is important to be aware of this so that you consider how business processes and system integration layers might link CRM and ERP solutions.

Hopefully this post has helped with your revision for the MB2-713 exam.
J