As I prepare for my Dynamics 365 certification in sales (MB2-717), I am creating blog posts based on my revision. I hope that collectively these posts may prove useful to anyone also preparing for the MB2-717 exam. This time I will cover the concepts around the lines item we find on transactional entities.
Sales order processing within Microsoft Dynamics 365 is designed to allow companies to create and track sales in a consistent and measurable manner. This is done by making use of opportunities and related transactional entities such as quote, order and invoice. In earlier posts I have already described the process of capturing leads and converting them into opportunities, plus I’ve covered the management 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 products.
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.
When the revenue calculation is set to user provided the estimated revenue total shown on the opportunity will be manually entered. However if the revenue is system calculated the total “Opportunity Line Amount” will be shown in the estimated revenue field. (And the estimated revenue field would be read-only.)
Note:
Estimated revenue on an opportunity is often an important value as commonly this is the value reported in the sales pipeline.
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 furniture! 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.
Note:
Whilst write-in products do not use a price list, you will still need to have selected a price list on the opportunity to be able to add them.
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 should be aware that write-in products do not need a unit of measure, have no properties and cannot have related product suggestions.
You can see below that I have added the sale of two desks onto my opportunity. 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.
Write in products might also be useful for including negative values. For example, if you wanted to give an itemized discount value or credit to the order as a whole.
Total Discounts
You have seen above that we could use a negative value on a write in product as an itemized discount. Plus we can enter a discount value per line item. You should however be aware that it is also possible o discount the total value by a value or percentage.
See below that I have applied a 10% discount to the total opportunity value.
Also notice that we can add a freight amount to the total that is not subject to the discount percentage.
Tax
Whist covering these total values I should possibly mention the total tax value. The total tax value on the opportunity is read-only. It is actually a sum of the tax amount entered for each product line. Out of the box we do not see the tax value in the sub grid on the opportunity form!
However double clicking on a product line will show the opportunity line form. If you need to reflect the tax amount it can be entered on this form.
Note: Out of the box, the tax amount is not a calculated field. Meaning you will have to manually calculate and enter the tax value for each line item. (This same logic applies to write-in and existing products.)
Having entered a tax amount on my line item you can see that it is now shown in the total tax field 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???
Currency exchange rate applies when;
- The record is created.
- Whenever a money field is changed. (As the current exchange rate will be applied.)
- The state of the record changes. (For example when an open opportunity is marked as won.)
Other Entities!
One final point ….. I have given most of the details in this post in terms of the opportunity entity. However you will need to be aware that the same approach to adding / amending line items exists on the transactional entities of quotation, order and invoice.
I hope this post has helped with your revision for the MB2-717 exam.
Microsoft Dynamics 365 