Maintaining a retail store is not an easy task. You have to take care of several aspects. Unfortunately, not many retailers know how to do it. They struggle to take care of things such as retail store management, providing customer experience and support etc. It is wise to get Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Retail Management Solution if you desire to better the process.  Now, this another product from Microsoft that is aiming at improving the overall performance of your company. Installing and using this software is pretty ease. You might struggle a bit during the initial stages. For example, you might not know things such as POS receipts printing as well as struggle dealing with connectivity issues in Microsoft 365. Here’s everything you need to know how to handle these things. Dynamics 365 for Retail provides mid-market and large retailers with a complete head office and point of sale (POS) solution that includes support for online and brick-and-mortar stores. It can help retailers increase financial returns, improve service, manage growth, reach customers, and streamline efficiencies. Dynamics 365 for Retail supports two types of POS experience: Cloud POS is a browser-based POS that can  be started in any standard browser on Desktops, Laptops, mobile devices. Retail Modern POS (MPOS App) can be used on clients such as PCs and tablets to process sales transactions, customer orders, and daily operations, and to perform inventory management.There are many obvious reasons as to why a retailer would prefer to choose Cloud POS instead of Modern POS: Since CPOS runs in a browser, the application isn’t installed on the device. Instead, the browser accesses the application code from the CPOS server.  Which is why you wont be able to use cloud POS in offline state but these days Internet connectivity is available almost 24/7 so it’s not an issue. A zero-footprint, cloud-hosted solution brings benefits in terms of cost and simplicity. Sales staff can process sales transactions and customer orders, perform clienteling activities, and perform daily operations and inventory management on mobile devices anywhere in the store, and also at PC-based registers. Deployment is easy as no installation is required except for the hardware station which on the main host system. All you need to do is activate the POS. When you change/upgrade your system, all you need to do is re-activate CPOS. You can also set up Hybrid Android app which lets you use CPOS though Android App on any Android phone. One of the advantages of having CPOS is it’s cross platform availability. It can run on any operating system. All it requires is a browser to run.

Two departments that are most important in a business is finance and operations. Unless they are efficient and perform well, you as a company are going to struggle a lot. Hence, you need to plan on using Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations to streamline your business. It is yet another product from Microsoft that will allow your business to tackle difficult issues with ease.  If your staff spends a few hours learning how to use the product they will become quite efficient. They will become super efficient in tackling any hurdles that might come on the way. For example, deleting model/package might not be an easy task. Here are details of how you can do it with ease Many of the time when You don’t want Existing Data Types(Base Enums, EDTs) or Data Models(Table, Views etc)  and many more elements which can ultimately cause naming conflict while development. So Option is either you want to delete those data type or Model consisting those Data Model/Data Types. Following methods are needed to be performed while Deleting model: 1.First Open Services and Select  Microsoft Dynamics 365 Unified Operations: Batch Management Service and Stop that services 2.Navigate To following path K:\AosService\PackagesLocalDirectory And Select Your Respective package/Model and delete that Note:- Here I’m using One box machine so my “AosService” is located at K drive. For other machine users “AosService” can be located at other location so you will look for it and Follow steps same as above. 3. Don’t forget To start Microsoft Dynamics 365 Unified Operations: Batch Management Service again. 4. Now refresh models from Visual Studio as follows You have successfully Deleted the Respective model/Package. Hope this helps!

Hello guys, The two types of point of sale or POS in Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Retail Management Solution are MPOS and CPOS. MPOS is Modern Point of Sale and CPOS is Cloud Point of Sale. There is no offline functionality when it comes to Cloud POS. It has a unique design that allows you to pair it up with the hardware station. The MPOS, on the other hand, is a POS app that one can access with ease on tablets, and PCs. Migrating from MPOS to CPOS is a good option because Cloud POS can run on any platform since the browser accesses the application code from the CPOS server but it can become a time-consuming task if you do not follow the standard process. In this article, I am going to demonstrate how to change/migrate from Modern POS to Cloud POS in Dynamics 365 for Retail. Once you activate Cloud POS you can access POS directly from any web browser. However, you do need to install the Hardware station. Because CPOS runs in a browser, the application isn’t installed on the device. Therefore, CPOS can’t directly access POS hardware or work in an offline state. Step 1: Go to all Retail stores Step 2: Click on the Register for which you want to change from MPOS to CPOS Step 3: Click on the device Step 4: In the application type Select Retail Cloud POS Step 5: Change Activation status to Pending and click on Validate devices for activation. Click Ok for all workers Step 6: Click on Cloud POS URL Step 7: Activate it using HQ user ID and password. Select appropriate store and register that you had activated on HQ which is in pending state. If it’s in activated state then it wont reactivate. Step 8: Next step is to install the Hardware station so you can connect hardware peripherals to your POS. Go to your store and scroll down to Hardware stations. Select shared. In the Hostname field enter the name of your computer(find it in system information of your system) and click on download. Step 9: Run the downloaded file. It may ask you to install OPOS Common control driver from the link. Download the latest one and click next. Step 10: Enter the Retail server URL Step 11: Open IIS then go to SSL certificate Step 12: Double click on Server certificate and click on Create self signed certificate Step 13: Select the SSL certificate Step 14: Use any of the open ports or you can use 9091 Step 15: All the setups are done. Now go back to the POS and click on select hardware station and pair it with the hardware device Hope this helps!

Let’s say you need to create a new store with multiple registers on CPOS.   It is now possible to have a retail store with multiple registers each running CPOS and each having their own dedicated hardware.   For example: A store with two registers both running CPOS and both having their own receipt printer, scanner, etc. . Here comes the concept of a shared hardware station for CPOS, It may seem impractical to have multiple registers sharing the same scanner, pin pad, etc but it is actually possible.   You’ll need to install a hardware station per CPOS and then you should be good to go.   Sharing hardware can be handy in scenarios with limited space or lesser sales persons moving around taking the sales and so on and it’s valid for CPOS.   Note: However, for MPOS you need a dedicated hardware.   Please notice that you can’t have multiple hardware stations installed on the same machine. Please do correct me anyone if that has changed 🙂 This can be done absolutely and is perfectly possible. Just deploy a Hardware station on each device and it will work as discussed in the example above.

Hi, In this blog I am going to illustrate how to get past the printing issues when you are trying to print Customer order, Quotation etc. Let’s consider a scenario: You are using a POS printer which is connected to your CPOS system. After finishing a transaction you want to print the receipt again from the ‘Show journal’ tab. When you go to show journal and attempt to print a order receipt you get following error Here, you dont need to panic and start troubleshooting the hardware station. The issue may not be with the hardware station but with receipt itself.  The issue is when you attempt to print a receipt from show journal sometimes it displays large receipt format such as the below one. Now this receipt will not print from the POS printer such as Epson and is bound throw an error. Hence you get hardware station error. However there is a way to resolve this. You can switch to a small receipt format by direction keys button located on the bottom right of the page. After switching to a smaller receipt format, you can go ahead and print it easily with POS Printer. Hope this helps!

Dynamics 365 for finance and operations is one of the best ERP solutions in the world. Clients can do a lot of complex jobs with ease when they choose to go for ERP solutions. It not only helps in improving the efficiency of the staff but will also help in improving the productivity of the company and will also help in managing the relationship with the clients. An enterprise is going to have total control of their business when they pick an ERP solution such as Microsoft Dynamics.  The best part is that Microsoft Dynamics has some of the most unique features that you will not find in any other ERP solution or software that you find in the world. Many of the time while development we have problems due to IIS services which are necessary while debugging in D365 Finance and Operations, many of the time problems can be just resolved by restarting IIS services on one box machine. IIS services can be restarted using two methods one is from Visual studio itself and the other is from Command prompt. Let’s see both the methods one by one: 1.Restart IIS services by Visual Studio:- this is a quite easy method only needs that your visual studio should be opened with administrator permissions. Now in Visual Studio Navigate to Dynamics 365 option and click on it Now select Option Restart IIS Express thats it Now your IIS Express service will restart 2.Restart IIS services by Command Prompt:- Other than Visual Studio IIS Express can be restarted using Command Prompt as follows Open Command Prompt as an Administrator Now enter the command as “iisreset” and Hit enter After completion, you will see the following screen That’s it, your IIS Service will get restarted using Visual Studio and Command Prompt.

“Run Jobs” – as the name suggests is a process between Retail Channels and Retail essentials through which we transfer data between channels and database. Please Note: Jobs Run at a specified time which may be different for every Retail Scheduler. Be aware of what the time is set for jobs to run automatically.  Running jobs at a specific time requires setting to be done so that we can schedule a specific job to run at specific time. It can be easily done manually. You’ll have to follow the below steps: Step 1: Go to distribution schedule or Channel database in Retail Dynamics 365. If the job doesn’t run from distribution schedule run it through channel database. Step 2: Go to download sessions and make sure your Job is available or in applied state. If it is in available state, go to “Batch Jobs“. Step 3: Now you will have to find the same batch job that you were searching and need to run it at a specified time. Step 4: Here, since the Job is in waiting state, you need to change it’s scheduled date and time to current time. This change must be according to the time at which you want your job needs to be run. The specified time will make your job run immediately.   Step 5: You can check if Job is being applied in “Download sessions” whenever required. Step 6: You can also change how often the job should run from going to Recurrence. Step 7: Only things highlighted in Red boxes should be checked. Hope this helps!!! Thank you! Please feel free to post any doubts you have.

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.

Most times when you want to use AddCustomView() method to a Dynamics 365 control, you need to pass layoutXml to the method that will show the view you define. There’s an easier trick than writing this up. Select your View Assuming, you have an Advanced Find view open in the window which you want as a layoutXml of, on the same, press F12 to open Dev Tools. Select the selector. And on the Advanced Find window, select Body section Click on it, and the par will be selected in the Console of the Dev Tools. Once this is available, search for layoutXml and cycle through the results to go to the last result. select the “value” part. That is your layoutXml. Hope this helps.

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.