Import Bookings is one of the important features provided by PSA for users to do Time Entries quickly and efficiently. An issue faced while using this functionality is the Project Tasks are not imported with the Bookings Records (As Shown in the Image Below). A solution to this issue is two automated flows: To Bring the Project Tasks from Resource Requirements Entity to Bookable Resource Booking. Hence to bring the obtained Project Tasks from Bookable Resource Booking to Time Entries. Let’s Begin with the Implementation of the solution! (Flow To get Project Tasks from Resource Requirements to Bookable Resource Bookings) Step: 1 Bringing Project Tasks from Resource Requirement’s to Bookable Resource Booking. Step: 2 Update the Bookable Recourse Booking Record with the obtained project task. Now we have successfully obtained the Project task in the Bookable Recourse Bookings           Entity from the Resource Requirements, Our Next step is to Take this Project task on the Time Entries. (Flow to get Project Task from Bookable Resource Bookings to Time Entries) Step: 1 Bringing Project Task from Bookable Resource bookings to Time Entries. (Tip : It is better to check if the Project Task Field is empty or not hence we can also put a condition to do so, if the Project Task Field is empty proceed with updating the Project Task field else Terminate.) Step: 2 Get the Project Task from the Bookable Recourse Bookings. Step: 3 Update the Time Entries with the obtained Project task. Step: 4 Import Bookings and there you go you will now be able to see the Project Tasks. Hope this Helps!

In my previous blog referred here https://d365feeds.com/2020/07/08/how-do-contract-milestones-and-projects-flow-between-d365-ce-to-fo-in-project-operations/, we saw how the contract and milestones flow between CE and F&O in the integrated scenario in Project Operations. Next step is to Post the Milestones or the Approved Time entries (in case of T&M based projects) in F&O (Finance and Operations) Let’s looks at first Milestone based Invoice posting in F&O for a Fixed Bid Project: PN: How to log in to the environment is shown in my previous blog in the link above. Step 1: Login to the CE Environment to the Milestone that you need to Invoice and flip the status to “Ready for invoicing”. Step 2: The invoice is created in the CE Environment and you need to confirm the same. Upon confirming the invoice it gets integrated to the F&O Environment. Step 3: Navigate to F&O Environment and go to Project Management and Accounting à Import from staging table. This will import all the transactions available in the staging area to F&O environment. Step 4: At this juncture the Invoice is now posted to the F&O Environment. To check the same in F&O environment navigate to Project Management and Accounting Module à Pending project transactions You can see the Invoices milestone below. Step 5: Select the invoice and click on Post. This is when the invoicing of milestone is completed. This step is recommended to be performed by the Accounts Manager. Now we shall see how to Invoice Time and Material projects. Follow the steps to accomplish the same. Step 1: Navigate to CE Environment and get some time entries done on the T&M project as shown below. Step 2: Submit the time entries done by clicking the Submit button as shown below. The status of the time entries changes to Submitted from Draft status. Step 3: The project manager will now have to approve the time entries submitted from the Approvals tab. Step 4: As soon as the time entries are approved they are integrated and reside in the staging area of F&O. You then need to Import all the time entries from the staging area. Navigate to F&O Environment and go to Project Management and Accounting à Import from staging table. This will import all the transactions available in the staging area to F&O environment. Step 5: Post that navigate to Project Management and Accounting à Project Operation integration journal where all the approved time entries in CE environment get collected. Please understand that if there is an active Journal existing in F&O environment, then all the approved time entries for all the projects will be integrated to the same Journal, unless all the entries in that integration journal is approved. Step 6: Select the Journal from the below and click on the Post button from Ribbon. This will post all the transactions from the Journal, which also the final step that the Accounts manager will perform to do the invoicing. Above methods when performed can ensure that the milestones and the time entries for FP and T&M projects respectively are done. The above operations are prescribed to be done by the Accounts Manager in the company. This ends the process of Posting the Invoice in F&O Environment. The above blog is written with the best possible knowledge of Project Operations and practical experience.

Many times, we feel like why I can’t access D365 CRM Database directly from MS SQL Server, so here is my blog that will guide you on how you can connect D365 CRM CDS Database using MS SQL Server Steps to enable D365 CRM CDS Database to make it connect from MS SQL Server: Login to https://admin.powerplatform.microsoft.com/ using administrator credentials. In Environment section, click on your environment for which you want to enable D365 CRM CDS for MS SQL Server. (In my case I am clicking on DemoEnvironment as shown below.) When Environment opens click on settings in header. Settings page will open, Click on Product and then click on Features. When features Page opens enable TDS Endpoint (Preview) and click save. Now, we have successfully enabled D365 CRM CDS to connect it from MS SQL Server. Steps to Connect CDS Database from MS SQL Server: Open MS SQL Server. In connect to SQL Server Window enter Server name (It will be your D365 CRM URL) followed by comma and Port Number (5558) e.g. of server name yourdomain.crm.dynamics.com,5558. Select Authentication as Azure Active Directory – Password. Enter Username: Your admin user id e.g. admin@xyz.com Enter Password: (Your Login password) ******** Click Connect. Now, you have successfully connected to D365 CRM DB. Write a select query and test if it’s working.

In my last LinkedIn Post (Cash Position Report), I talked about the strategic importance of Cash on hand for a Professional Services Organization. In this post, I want to talk about the importance of the Overdue Accounts Receivable (AR) Report. As a Professional Services firm, most of our revenue comes from Project based delivery of Services. We have some top-line revenue from the subscription services we sell like Dynamics 365, but it’s not significant. So, our primary source of revenue is Services. We needed to ensure we bill on time, get paid on time. So we developed our Power BI AR Report as shown below – So let’s dive in! A few things to note in the above Report – It is a PowerBI Report embedded in our Leadership Team in our Microsoft Teams platform. We call it the PSA AR Report, as the reporting comes from our invoicing in Dynamics 365 PSA. Dynamics 365 PSA is our ‘single source of truth‘ for all our Project based billing. The bottom of the Report has two tabs – Services and Licensing/Commission Invoices. More on that shortly. Dynamics 365 PSA is our the single source of truth for all Customer Invoicing. We run all our Project based Services Invoicing from the Invoicing and Contract Milestone Schedule in Dynamics 365 PSA. This means our Allocations, Contract Milestones and our Time entries are always up-to-date, otherwise our invoicing schedule would be incorrect. This ensures good Project Management practices. Now PSA does not handle taxation, so you have to either setup your taxation customization or use an off the shelf tax add on that is available on the Microsoft AppSource. If none of these options are possible, then you can decide to create your invoices in your Accounting system and integrate those into Dynamics 365 PSA. We do that for our Licensing invoices to our Customers and integrate those from our QuickBooks Online Accounting system into Dynamics 365 PSA. We also ensure that invoices are only emailed to customers from Dynamics 365 so we can track these emails. Further, we update Invoice Statuses from Draft to Sent to Paid. Now let’s get into the Report. Basically, we have color coded our Report based on the following simple rules – Red for anything that is overdue by 30 days or more, yellow for anything that is between 1-30 days overdue and no color coding for current invoices. The visual impact of color coding can’t be emphasized enough. On the top left corner of the Report, we have an option to search by Customer, so we can quickly get all invoices for a specific customer in the AR Report. This becomes very useful when you want to just share a snapshot with your customer for overdue invoices.  Handling Multiple Legal Entities: We have three legal entities – India, USA and Singapore. We have three separate QuickBooks Online Accounts for each legal entity, but we use a single Dynamics 365 CRM platform. We have made customizations on our Invoice entity to ensure we capture the correct legal entity. In the example below, you can see we classify our Invoices by legal entity in our Report – You can see there is column called ‘link’ in the above reports. Clicking on any invoice in this link directly takes us to the Invoice record in Dynamics 365.  Overdue Reminders Alerts- We automated the Overdue Reminders so that our system automatically sends out a reminder for all overdue invoices every Monday.  After all this effort, you still need to ensure regular and rigorous review of this report to ensure you can take action on overdue invoices. This is done through our scheduled Monday morning Management Status Meetings. The agenda for this meeting is recurring and hence set in advance, but this Management meeting always starts with AR Report Review. Our Accounts Manager is invited for the first 15 minutes and we go through all Overdue Invoices (especially the Red color coded ones!) and decide if we need to take further steps like setting up a meeting with the customer.  If you are a small or mid sized Services organization, it is of utmost importance to get paid on time. By ensuring you have such a report and reviewing and planning action items for overdue invoices, you will run an efficient Services organization. In addition, there is another strategic benefit here – this report is like a Quality Check on your services. If your customer is paying on time and suddenly does not, your proactive action to talk with the customer can help you understand if there are any issues in your Services and you can take corrective action. Our PSA AR Report is available to our Management team (this includes our Delivery Heads and Practice Leads as well) through Microsoft Teams and they can view it any time they want, planning action items as needed. If it is hidden away only with the Accounts Team and available through some weekly PDF report, it is not efficient for your organization. This Report will help your organization achieve it’s Objective – ‘bill on time, get paid on time.’ If you are keen on understanding more about our Internal Systems that keep us running and growing, our Internal Systems page is a wonderful resource – https://www.cloudfronts.com/our-internal-systems/ or reach out to me at ashah@cloudfronts.com.

In this post, I will talk about the importance of the Cash Position Report for any Professional Services Organization.  The Cash Position is your current and forecasted ‘Cash in Hand’. The importance of having Cash in your bank account cannot be emphasized enough. It is important to understand the difference between Cash Flow and Cash in Hand as they are not the same. An organization can have a solid cash flow (which is revenue tied up in Receivables), but without money in the bank, it cannot operate. Let me go into this further as it’s the foundation of our conversation here.  For any Professional Services organization, anywhere from 60 to 80% of the Monthly expenses are tied to Employee salaries. Paying salaries on time, every month is key to the organization’s credibility. Salaries need to happen on time, month after month, irrespective of your cash flow. They require cash on hand. In addition, any business planning, from HR Activities (a team lunch, an offsite meet) to Investing in the organization’s growth (new areas of business, developing expertise) also requires cash on hand.  One more topic that I need to mention is the current pandemic. Many Projects are delayed, cancelled or on hold. From a business standpoint, this kind of unforeseen event can put a tremendous strain on its ability to continue operations. But while the current pandemic is an extreme scenario, businesses constantly face challenges as we operate on a global level (2004 Tsunami, 2008 Financial Meltdown are some recently examples). Cash on Hand can mean the difference between survival and going out of business.  So we see that Cash on Hand is a Key Metric and hence should be reviewed regularly, ideally during a scheduled Management meeting on a recurring basis. At CloudFronts, we do this review every Monday morning. Our two and a half hour Monday morning Management meetings are literally run by numbers. Some of the Key Reports we review are Project Overview Report, Team Billable & Non-Billable Allocation Report, Support Metrics, Sales Pipeline, Outstanding Accounts Receivable Report, Forecasted AR Report, Cash Position Report. Each one of these is a PowerBI Report embedded into our Microsoft Teams Leadership Team Group.  So what is the Cash Position Report? I will start with a simple equation and then delve into the details –   Cash Position = Cash + AR – AP + Projected AR Now let’s walk through each of the Items in there and how we get that data – Cash on Hand – This is what is in your Bank Account when you run this Report (our report is updated every Monday morning before our weekly Management Meeting). We manually enter this data into the Report.  AR – AR is your Accounts Receivable which includes all Customer Invoices that are due this month and have not yet been paid. This includes overdue invoices carried forward from the previous month as well. If an Invoice is Paid, then it goes into Cash on Hand. Our AR data comes from Dynamics 365 PSA Contract Invoicing Schedule for both Fixed Bid and Time & Materials Projects. Our Contract Invoicing Schedule is the Single source of truth for all our Project Services Invoicing.  AP – AP is all Payables this month, including Salaries. It comes from our Accounting System which is currently QuickBooks Online.  Projected AR – Projected Accounts Receivable are any Invoices that we will generate this month and that will be due this month. This data also becomes from our Contract Invoicing Schedule. For Fixed Bid, this is based on the Contract Billing Milestones and for Time & Materials, this data comes from the Team Member Allocations.  At the top of the Report, you will see that the report is month wise. Hence as you move into the future months, you have less visibility into AR data, but rely on your Projected AR data. As you move into a month, the Projected AR starts becoming AR, which then becomes cash on hand and typically by the end of the month, Projected AR should be zero.  This Report gives the Management Team a clear visibility of the company’s Cash Position over a period of time. For us, we are looking at six months into the future, but organizations can easily set this up for longer periods. By reviewing it regularly, in a scheduled meeting, you ensure there are no surprises and you have time to react well in advance.  The benefits of such a report are further amplified when you consider its impact on our behaviour. During the pandemic, our No.1 priority has been to ensure we are a stable organization with the ability to operate through this pandemic. This report can give you that stability and allow you to stay productive and impact your team with a positive state of mind.  If you are keen on understanding more about our Internal Systems that keep us running and growing, our Internal Systems page is a wonderful resource – https://www.cloudfronts.com/our-internal-systems/ CloudFronts is one of the leading Microsoft Partners globally on implementing Professional Services Automation on the Microsoft Dynamics 365 Platform. You can reach me on LinkedIn for any questions/queries or email me at ashah@cloudfronts.com

Among the fabulous sessions at MBAS 2020 Online Conference, Introduction of Project Operations was the most anticipated for me. Here are my takeaways from the same – Gurkan Salk & Kevin Horlock provided an overview of what to expect for Project Operations/  What is Project Operations? Some key points –  Project Operations is an extension of capabilities to existing PSA in Dynamics 365 to a whole new product called as Project Operations. This is a new offering by Microsoft. GA is 1st Oct 2020 Project Operations will utilize the Project based Sales Capabilities including quotation and resourcing  Project Management capabilities will run from Microsoft Project and utilize the power scheduling engine it has to offer. Taking capabilities directly from Project for the Web. Will now be embedded inside Project Operations Capabilities of D365 Finance will be utilized for Costing and Invoicing/Accounting capabilities. Better Teams Integration to bring in Project Team Members on a Teams channel to be able to better collaborate. Flexible and easy to use Gannt Chart for Tasks. Clicking on the bars would let us configure the attributes of the Task Resource Manager has all visibility across all Projects. Revenue Recognition in Finance and Operations – Looking into Project And Operations for Outstanding Invoices. Overview of the Revenue Recognition angle of a Project can be over-viewed in FnO. AI to interpret receipts what have been scanned and entered against the Project. When is Project Operations available? General Availability is 1st Oct 2020 Some good QnAs in the session Could Integrate with Azure DevOps.Ans: Won’t be available out-of-box integration, but we can use Power Automate. Planned Integration?Ans: No direct Planner usage. PO and supporting CDSAns: PO will run on Dynamics platform. Will encapsulate PSA capabilities. All PO data available in CDS. Hope this initial info helps and we’ll keep you posted as we approach GA.

The new Project Service coming up is a much-advanced version of PSA. Even more, than it will be called as Project Service. We would learn about it and a few features that are exposed to the world shortly in the blog below. How to Install and Basic Requirement? The new project service can be installed on the Default environment of CRM. Now if this confuses you, let me explain. Every CRM environment has a Default CRM Instance associated to it. How to go and check it? Follow the below steps: Step 1: Ensure you have Project Plan 3 or Project Plan 5 license procured. Go to your admin portal and assign the license to your login id. Step 2: Login to https://admin.powerplatform.microsoft.com/ with your admin credentials. Step 3: Click on Environments. Before that ensure you toggle the switch to use “Try new admin centre”. Step 4: On the right-side pane, you will see a default environment mentioned as “Default” in front of the environment name. Click on it to see the URL of the environment. Step 5: Click on the URL to open the environment and below page will appear. Click on Project from the apps that you see.   You will be taken the Active Project view as shown below: Create a New Project In order to create a new project, click on +New Project button mentioned on the Ribbon Control. It will ask you for some basic details like Project Name, Project Manager and Calendar Template. As soon as you save the project, the estimated start date comes up as the current date. Next step is the plan the schedule (WBS) so we will navigate to Tasks. As soon as you click on tasks. It will take some time initially for the first time to connect to the project online services and you will see 3 tabs coming as shown below. Let’s look at each one of them one-by-one. Grid This is where you create your WBS, Assign Resources, Set Duration, Predecessor and many more. As soon as the task is created in the WBS. It creates a similar task on the Board (Explained below). Good Thing: a. We can mark the task as complete in new WBS with Project Service which was not the case in an earlier version (PSA). b. It is connected to the new Project Online Services so we can take advantage of the Project Online features right herewith. c. We can manage the project using the board which is much nice a feature. Needs Improvement: a. Here the Duration and efforts are tightly integrated to each other and in case one changes the other too changes. b. Boards should have allowed adding sprints in them, so we could even do Agile Project Management there. 2. Board This is where you can create tasks, to which the resources can be assigned. You can add Bucket (Swim lanes in Azure DevOps) to manage the state of the tasks. It also manages the progress of the task, Remaining effort, etc. 3. Timeline This is the Gantt Chart view of the tasks based on the efforts entered. What’s not available and when will it be available Currently, only the WBS or the Project Planning Module via Project Online is Exposed for General Availability. The sales extension and the invoicing piece is expected to be announced in Feb’2020. This blog reflects my personal findings and based solely on my experience of using Project Service for the last couple of months. For those who are looking for a platform that can track and manage the entire procedures of sales and project management, I would highly recommend them to try new Project Service as guided above.

Mircosoft D365 Project Service Automation is a product that unites technology, processes, and people together in streams such as sales, billing, resourcing and delivery in a company. Thus, a business can scale up high when they use this particular software. They can complete the project on time and within the budget as a result of using this product from Microsoft.  Businesses can accelerate the maturity of their professional services when they use this software. Managing the project becomes easy for the management team and the project managers. Learning and using software is also pretty easy. It does not take a lot of time to master this product.  Here are some details of how this software will help your company: While booking resources, you often don’t pay attention to how much capacity the resource has. Or rather, you are aware, but you want to book the resource anyway (only to change later on, which I don’t recommend.) In that case, if you are trying to overbook a resource out of their capacity, you are treated with this message below – Why this occurs? This is because of the Work Hours defined for the Resource. Rather, what Work Hour Template is assigned to that resource. Now, let’s say, you are trying to book someone for 8 hours on top of their already booked 2 hours If you switch to the Hours view, you’ll see the availability marked by white cells. Grey meaning, unavailable. Remember, this is even said in the error message when you tried to click Book. Alternative Of course you can do this, but you should have a very strong reason to overbook resources. 🙂 Switch to Evenly Distribute Hours to allow the resource to be booked on top of the existing one. And this should be fine, but it will appear in red indicating that the resource is overbooked. Say, 10 hours (on top of already booked 2 hours) – exceeding the 9 hours total limit. Suggested You should rather Propose Book the resource, this way, the booking will exist and won’t bloat the schedule board. And then, you can decide later to do something with it. Front Load – Proposed Now with combination of Front-Load and Proposed, you should be able to Book for only the remaining capacity Evenly Distributed – Proposed With Evenly Distributed Proposed, you should be able to exceed the capacity and even Propose for the full time you want.   Hope this quick tip helps! 🙂  

Problem Definition: The sales cycle in my company demands me to create an opportunity every time a CR is requested or there is an additional estimate via a proposal that we ask on the current project from the customer. This needs me to go through the cycle from Opportunity to Quote to Contract. But, in this cycle, I do not want to create another Quote or contract, but update the existing one to add another Quote Line Detail. This is not possible once the Quote is marked a won in PSA. Solution: Following is what can be done to enable the Quote to move it to Draft mode an make it editable. Step 1: Go to the Quote and click on the Flow button in the Ribbon control and click on Create New Flow as shown in the screenshot below. Step 2: Use the Common Data Service Template and click on Continue. In case you see this page and you are not signed in with your account, please sign in and continue. Step 3: On the next screen select the details as shown in the below screenshot. Step 4: Select the Update Record Option from below as shown.   Step 5: Click on Add Dynamic Content link and select Quote field from there as shown below. Step 6: Change the field “Status Value” to Draft and Save the Flow. Step 7: Navigate to the flow and name is as shown below. Step 8: Its time now to test the Flow developed. Navigate to your Quotes and filter out the Won Quotes. Open one Quote and Click on Flow button from the Ribbon control and select the Flow that we wrote as shown below Step 9: Refresh the page and check that the Flow has done its job and the Quote is now in the Draft mode, ready to edit. This blog reflects my personal findings and based solely on my experience of using PSA for the last 3+ years. For those who are looking for a platform that can track and manage the entire procedures of sales and project management, I would highly recommend them to try Microsoft dynamics 365 for project service automation.

Problem Definition: One of my clients decided to use Expense module in PSA and to his surprise he could see the amount value to be 0 in the Actuals. But, at the same time the Cost line had values in it. Upon researching and digging into all the configurations I was tired and couldn’t conclude. Finally, one configuration that made it work was to add the Transaction Category in the Sales Price List and make it Chargeable at Cost. Below is how to do it: Navigate to the project contract. Open the Pricelist associated with the Contract. It can be either the default pricelist or can be the custom price list for that particular contract. In the case shown in the screen shot, it is the Custom Price List. How do we Identify whether it is a Custom Price List is that, with the name of the Pricelist i.e. Sales Price List USD, there is the name of the opportunity and the Timestamp appended to it. You will see it in the screenshot below. Once you open that Custom Price List and Navigate to Category Prices, Click on “+ Add New Transaction Category” You will see a Quick Create Form opening up to add the Transaction Category. Fill in the details as shown in the below screenshot. The click on Save and Close and you will see your transaction Category added in the Grid. Your configuration is now ready. The next step is: To raise an expense as shown below. Configure/Create a Expense Category and relate it to the Transaction Category as per below. Navigate to Settings Area and Click on Expense Categories and then click on New. 2. Fill in the details as shown below. If you observe in the above image, there is a Transaction Category associated with the expense category and that is the one that should be present in the PriceList that we discussed initially in the above part of this blog. Once the expense is raised, Submit it. Submission sends it for the project Manager for approval. Project Manager approves it and as soon as the Project Manager approves it, it gets converted to Actuals as shown below. 4. Last step is to Create Invoice and see if the Expense gets shown up in the Invoice. For the same traverse to Project Contract and Open the specific project contract. It will automatically take you to Invoice Entity where the Invoice will be generated as shown below. Tips to remember: For Fixed Bid Project contract, you will need to create one more project contract line header which is of T&M type. This will be associated with another project on which you can raise the expenses. For T&M, we can still continue to raise the expense on the same project and there is no need of creating one more project contract line header. This blog reflects my personal findings and based solely on my experience of using PSA for last 3+ years. For those who are looking for a platform that can track and manage the entire procedures of sales and project managements, I would highly recommend them to try Microsoft dynamics 365 for project service automation.