This post is part of a series I’m creating connected with Project Service Automation (PSA) for Microsoft Dynamics 365. This time I will consider the PSA dashboards.

In my last post, I gave some insights into the PSA data model and therefore hopefully gave you some pointers on how to create custom views / reports. You can view that post here.

This time let’s consider the “out of the box” reporting options. By this I mean the pre-built dashboards in Dynamics 365. The dashboards arew focused on two roles “practice manager” and “resource manager”.

Practice Manager

A practice manager is someone who has overall responsibility for multiple projects. Therefore their focus will be the overall profitability of the practice. The practice manager dashboard includes visualizations of;

• Costs
• Gross margin
• Sales
• Total hours
• Utilization by role

On all of the visualizations show you can easily change the timeframe to show current month, current month vs. prior months or last month.

It is also possible to drill into any of the visualizations, this can be done using any field but the most common options are easily accessible. Including project, customer, role, bookable resource, transaction category and project contract.

Tip:
Transaction category can be time spent on your project. (Which you expect to be the largest portion of any column on the chart. But it can also be by expense category. (Such as airfare, hotels etc.)

Out of the box the Practice Manager dashboard is only available to users with selected roles, those roles include;

• Account Manager
• CEO-Business Manager
• Practice Manager
• System Administrator

Resource Manager Dashboard

The resource manager will be responsible for The resource manager dashboard shows;

• Requests by role
• Utilization by role
• Resource demand distribution

Tip:
Notice my requests by role chart, the role is showing as “blank”. If you look closer, you can see that the out of the box dashboard is plotting this chart using a field called “Role (Deprecated)”. Being a deprecated field it is no longer used! You might want to change this chart to plot data by the “requested by” field or some other more useful attribute. (Just not role! As now each request can relate to multiple roles!) Or simply swap the chart to be Requests By Project!

Out of the box the Resource Manager dashboard is only available to users with selected roles, those roles include;

• Account Manager
• CEO-Business Manager
• Resource Manager
• System Administrator

Hopefully this quick post has given you a flavour for the out of the box project service dashboards.
J