MB 210: Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Sales – Sales Reports

February 27, 2019

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 sales reports.

Below you can see that sales reports are mentioned in the skills measured statement;

Sales Reports

Microsoft Dynamics 365 contains multiple out of the box reports. Access to these can be found in the reporting option. Many reports exist (out of the box) and you can create more. There is a view which can be selected to show just the sales reports.

A similar option is available in the sitemap navigation for service, marketing and project service! Therefore reports can cover all aspects of Dynamics 365 but many of them have a sales focus. Below is a list of the sales related out of the box reports.

Name	Description
Account Distribution	Identify patterns in top revenue-generating accounts.
Account Overview	View a one-page overview of an account.
Account Summary	View a chronological summary of an account.
Competitor Win Loss	Compare how your sales team performs against competitors.
Invoice	View an invoice and its line items.
Invoice Status	View your accounts receivable.
Lead Source Effectiveness	Compare your lead sources.
Neglected Accounts	Identify accounts that have not been contacted recently.
Neglected Leads	Identify leads that have not been contacted.
Order	View an order and its line items.
Products By Account	View products that are used by an account.
Products By Contact	View products that are used by a contact.
Progress against goals	View progress against goals
Quote	View a quote and its line items.
Sales History	Understand past sales performance.
Sales Pipeline	View anticipated potential sales.

Typically we would select reports in the “reports” option shown above to be able to edit their format. (Or create new reports.)

Note:
In this post I will focus on the out of the box sales reports. But you might also find it useful to edit and create reports as part of your exam preparation.

Running Reports

Reports are typically run on either one or multiple records. Below you can see I have navigated to opportunities and from an opportunities view I can use the “Run Report” option to see all available reports.

Having selected a report you will be offered several options to run the report using differing selections of records. Including;

All applicable records
The selected records
All records on all pages in the current view

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.

Tip: Weighted revenue is calculated as a percentage of estimated revenue using the probability percentage.

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 Dynamics 365 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.

Additionally the ability for users to run and create reports can also be controlled from security role settings.

Another approach to running reports is to run them for a single record. The sales pipeline report in my first example gave an aggregated report based on all selected opportunities. Other reports, such as the account overview might be based on single records. You can run the account overview report for just one account or multiple ones. But when you select multiple accounts a page per account would be created.

Below you can see that I can open an entity form and access the report option directly on the form. In this instance the report will run on just the account I have open.

Below I have shown an example account overview report, run directly from my account record. Notice that the report is for an account but related records such as opportunities and cases can be included in the reports.

Running reports directly for a single entity might be useful for transaction style reports. Included out of the box are standard report formats for quotes, orders and invoices.

Tip:
It is also possible to generate quotes, orders and invoices using Word Templates. (I will cover these concepts in a future post.)

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. I am assuming the creation of custom reports will not be covered in the MB 210 exam! I believe it should be enough just to know that creating custom reports is available.

Hopefully this post has given you an insight into the out of the box reports available in Dynamics 365. As part of you prep for the MB 210 I encourage you to run multiple actual reports! You should become familiar with what reports are available, how they can be run and what export options exist.
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