Getting started with PSA

I am setting up PSA for a client and the goal is to start from setting up customers and projects and finish by generating an invoice. I am setting up their first signed contract using the PSA module in CRM system. As I go through setting up everything I am going to blog this series to help others. As I am dealing with a real example so I hope it comes out to be good. I am also going to keep track of the time and share some important takeaways. This series should give an idea about amount of effort required setting up everything and lessons learnt as well.

First of all I recommend going through the User Guide. This is important so you understanding what you are doing. Moreover background with Project estimation, execution, delivery and accounting also helps because it’s important to not lose sight of the end goa

https://www.microsoft.com/en-US/dynamics/crm-customer-center/dynamics-365-for-project-service-automation-user-s-guide.aspx

Here are some initial steps related to setting up PSA. I think they are important so following them in order would certainly help.

As you get to creating organization units I think it becomes important to pause and think about what this means. Organization Unit gives the ability associate a role with multiple pricelists based on the organization unit. I am setting up PSA for a consulting firm with offices in US, Australia, UK and Pakistan. I have created four Organization units with four different currencies. Setting up organization unit is covered in the link above so I will not share any examples here.

After creating the organization units the next step is to setup cost pricelist. Cost pricelist creates all the roles along with their cost for the organization. This is important to calculate project cost vs revenue during the estimation and execution process.

As this organization sells projects in US, UK and Australia so I will setup three Cost pricelists and associate with their respective organization units. Each organization leverages offshore resources so they will be part of the pricelist as well. Here is my US Organization unit and associated cost pricelists.

Notice that currency is defined on the organizational unit level. Moreover, You can associate multiple cost pricelists with the organization. In this one I have associated two pricelists. One for hourly cost of all the consultants and one with the daily costs.

PSA

You can see that this pricelist contains price (cost) for both onsite and offshore resources. Moreover the header information of the pricelist contain “context” field that is used to defined if it is a sales, purchase or a cost pricelist. Unit is also defined at the pricelist level and cannot be changed at the item level so if you want hourly pricing then you will have to create another pricelist.

Pricelist contains items “Role Price”. It is a grouping of role, resourcing unit and pricelist.

It can be a very tedious process to create all the roles and then create all the role prices. You can expedite by using excel import. It took me forever to manually upload all that information and eventually I just created an excel and imported all the data. I had almost 10 roles to create.

In the next blog we will create estimates and generate the contract. Afterwards we will setup invoice frequency which should be pretty straight forward as I am using weekly invoicing.

If you have any question or queries, do not hesitate to reach out to us!