NEIL PARKHURST

Sales Analysis is the next topic I intend to review as I prepare for the MB2-713 certification (Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2016 Sales)

I’ve already covered goals in a previous post, in addition to goals you’ll need to be aware of the Excel feature, understand charts and dashboards. Plus, you’ll need to know about PowerBI dashboards. As the exam has a sales focus you’ll be expected to be aware of the built-in reports.

Built in Reports

Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2016 contains multiple out of the box reports. Access to these can be found in the reporting option in the sales area of CRM.

Bespoke reports cover all aspects of CRM but many of them have a sales focus. Below is a list of the sales related out of the box reports. (I have removed marketing and service specific reports.)

Selecting a report will initially provide a dialog to allow the report content to be filtered. Below is an example of the sales pipeline report;

Clicking run report will then generate a report and display the results. Once the report is displayed you can further filter and group the data. For example, with the sales pipeline report I can filter by sales process, group by date, rating, sales stage (etc) and opt to display estimated revenue or weighted revenue.

Reported can also be exported as XML files, CSV files, PDF, MTHML, Excel, Tiff or Word. Or you could just print it!

You should remember that when running reports, the CRM security model will still apply, each report will only ever contain data that can be accessed using your role. A sales manager (for example) might be able to report on his team. Whilst an individual sales person will remain limited to just their own opportunities / accounts.

Another approach to running reports is to navigate to the entity and select the report from a list view. Below you can see that I have selected the “My Active Accounts” view and I can run the account overview, account summary and products by account on the selected accounts. Or I can run the sales history report against all accounts.

Running the Account Overview report with one account selected initially presents the dialog below.

Once an option is selected the report is generated and displayed as it was when run from the reports option. I selected to run the report account overview on just the record I had selected. My results looked like this.

A third method to access reports exists. Here you can see that I have opened an individual order and I can run the “Order” report directly from the order form.

My test order looked like this ……

In addition to the out of the box reports, users can create additional reports using the report wizard or developers can create reports tailored exactly to the company’s requirements. The creation of custom reports will not be covered in the MB2-713. I believe it should be enough just to know that creating customer reports is available.

Hopefully this post has given you an insight into the out of the box reports available in Dynamics CRM. As part of you prep for the MB2-713 it is worth running some actual reports to become familiar with what reports are available, how they can be run and what export options exist.

In my next post I will continue to look at sales analysis by reviewing how to export data to Excel. J