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 orders.

Below you can see the skills measured statement that refers to the managing sales entities, with sales orders being one of the entities we need to be aware of;

Previously I have covered creating a lead and progressing that to an opportunity, then I’ve looked at how to associate quotes to the opportunity. So now it makes sense to turn my attention to the next logical step in the process, orders.

An order is created when a customer confirms their purchase of a given product or service. (e.g. they accept a quote.) Orders can be created by “winning” quotes.

Whilst we will commonly create an order from a quote it is important for you to understand that it is possible to create an order without a quotation or even an opportunity. Out of the box, for example, the navigation gives the ability to create opportunities from an account. But it is a simple customization to add quotes, orders and opportunities to the account’s navigation. This approach means it is easy to tailor Dynamics 365 to match whatever sales cycle a particular company follows. The detailed customization of Dynamics 365 is beyond the scope of the MB 210 exam, so it “should” be enough just to know tailoring is possible.

Possible states for an order include;

• Active (open) – orders start off with a status of active.
• Fulfilled – a fulfilled order can be marked as complete or partial. (Think of a fulfilled order as a delivered order.) Once the order has been fulfilled it becomes read-only.
• Canceled -an open or fulfilled order can have its state changed to cancelled. A cancelled order cannot be re-opened.

An order can be invoiced whilst active or open. As you may decide to generate an invoice before or after delivery.

Like quotes we have a concept of status (statecode) and status reason (Statuscode). The table below shows the relationship between these two fields and all the possible status / status reason combinations.

Notice that I have shown two addition order states! Submitted and Invoiced. I have included these as they do exist as possible options for the status (statecode) field. However out of the box these are not used!

Tip:
You can add / customize status reason values. (Although customization will be beyond the scope of the MB2-717 exam.) For example, you may wish add additional reason why an order can have a status of “Canceled”.

Creating Orders

Orders can be created by marking a quotation as won or created directly without the need for an opportunity or a quote.

Note: The quotation will need to be in an active state, you cannot create an order from a draft quotation.

If the order is created from scratch then all of the fields such as price lists, products, currency (etc.) found on the opportunity / quote will need to be entered.

Below you can see a quotation, on the quotation I have selected CREATE ORDER. A dialog is displayed that will confirm the details and at the same time mark the quote as won. If your quotation is linked to an opportunity there will be an option to close the opportunity. And set the actual revenue value on the opportunity to the quota value or for you to manually enter an alternative value.

Clicking ok, will close the quotation as won, create an order and open the newly created order. Notice that the order form looks very similar to the quotation. Although there are some extra fields such as requested delivery date and date fulfilled.

Notice that my newly created order has a status of active and status reason of “new”. Out of the box I could change the status reason to “pending” or “On hold”. This might be used to illustrate that the order isn’t yet fulfilled (delivered) but it is being processed.

The pricing on the order will initially reflect the prices from the quotation. It might be that price increases have been applied since the quotation was created. In this circumstance you can select the USE CURRENT PRICING option to refresh the order prices based on the current price list item details. Once this has been done other amendments can also be made to discounts at this point or additional products added. Once the pricing is considered final the LOCK PRICING option can then be used to fix them.

Tip: Other amendments might be required at this point such as confirming ship to / bill to address details.

The recalculate button is important, changes to line items on the order will not automatically be applied to the order total until the order is saved. Clicking the recalculate button will force the order total to be recalculated with saving the order.

Fulfill an Order

When an order is completed (i.e. delivered), the FULFILL ORDER button is used. Doing so will present a dialog similar to the one below. Clicking “Fulfill” will now change the order status to fulfilled and the status reason to complete. Also, the order becomes read only at this point.

Cancel an Order

Cancelling an order is a very similar process to fulfilment! Except order status changes to Canceled. An order can be cancelled at any point, even after fulfilment. Once cancelled the order cannot be re-opened. Meaning if you accidently cancelled an order a new order would need to be created!

Out of the box when cancelling an order, you only have option one status reason option “No Money”. A common customization will be to adjust the reasons here to provide options applicable to your organisation. For example: In some sales situations the customer has the right to a 14 day cooling off period. You might want a specific status reason for cancelling orders during the 14 day window.

Create Invoice

Before or after the order is fulfil the “Create Invoice” button can be used to create and open the invoice. I will cover the full detail about invoices in a future post.

Hopefully this post has helped with your revision for the MB 210 exam. 