As I prepare for my Dynamics 365 certification in sales (MB 210), I’m creating blog posts based on my revision. I hope that collectively these posts may prove useful to anyone also preparing for the MB 210 exam. This time I will cover the concepts around business closures.

You will see that business closures are mentioned in the skills measured statement within the section headed “Perform Configuration”.

To be honest, I wouldn’t normally consider business closures to be a feature related to sales and MB 210 is a sales exam! But they are specifically mentioned in the skills measured statement, so I have included them in my revision. Typically, I have used business closures when working with customer service, project service or field service. I’ve used them to define when the business is closed and therefore service cannot be offered or project tasks scheduled.

If you are using the classic web client, you will find the business closures option in the settings area under business management.

Alternatively, within the settings area of the new admin center you will also find a link to the business closures option.

The concept of business closures is simple enough. Below you can see that I have a list of closures for 2019. Notice that I have a year in the command bar, meaning it is possible to navigate to the closures for a specific year as required.

Below you can see that I can define the start date, end date and duration of the closure. Also notice that this closure is an all event, it is possible to enter a start and end time if required. You’d use this, for example, if your business was closed for part of a day. Maybe for stock taking or some kind of planned maintenance etc.

Below you can see my working times for a resource. In this example, my resource is a project resource within Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Project Service. Notice that within the working calendar we can see the business closures shown.

When I define a new working pattern for a resource I also have an option to observe (or not) the business closures. This might be quite common. Maybe a regular engineer works Monday to Friday and observes business closures. But someone who is providing an “on call” service would ignore such restrictions.

As I said at the start, I am unclear why business closures is included in a sales exam! But they’re mentioned in the MB 210 skills measured and therefore I feel it wise to review the concept. If you’d like to dig deeper into the meaning of business closures try investigating resource scheduling in Project Service Automation or maybe Field Service.

If anyone happens to uncover an “out of the box” use case for business closures within the sales app please comment on this post and I will gladly amend!