If you are considering using Dynamics 365 for managing your projects then you must be familiar with project service automation module in Dynamics CRM. I am working on a few client projects for setting up PSA and the goal is to start from setting up customers and projects and finish by generating an invoice. I am in processing of configuring my customer’s first signed contract in the 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 so it would give an idea about amount of effort required for setting up everything and lessons learnt as well.
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First, I recommend going through the User Guide. This is important so you understand 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 goal.
Here are some initial steps related to setting up project service automation. 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 to associate a role with multiple pricelists based on the organization unit. I am setting up project service automation 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.
This organization has sales team in US, UK and Australia and only consultants in these geographical locations work on the projects in their territory. They sell 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 cost 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.
Open the pricelist
You can see that this pricelist contains price (cost) for both onsite and offshore resources. Moreover, the header information of the pricelist contains “context” field that is used to defined if it is a sale, 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 Items and Lesson Learnt
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.
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