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.

When it comes to creating a contract with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Project Service Automation (PSA), users often find that the path from opportunity to quote and contract is long, slow, and involves too many clicks. To make it more efficient and cut down on the number of clicks, we can combine the capabilities of Power Apps with Power Automate flows. People love tooling that helps take care of small steps automatically like creating a basic project-specific price list, the Quote line details, or milestones. Let’s understand what’s involved at each step to go from Opportunity to Quote to Contract and navigate the entire process more effectively. Navigating the process Step 1: Create the Opportunity by navigating to Opportunity Entity in Project Service App. Step 2: When saving the opportunity users run a Power Automate flow behind the scene that does the following things: 1. Create the Quote automatically based on the billing type. 2. Generate the Quote Line record. 3. Fills the project-specific Price List (developed in Power Apps). This is now very easy to edit since the interface becomes more user-friendly and it directly updates the Roles Prices in the Pricelist. This, too, is a lengthy process with the out of the box capabilities of PSA. 4. Generate the Quote Line Detail, with one line developed in Power Apps. The details will include: a) Developer b) Quantity set as one hour c) Choose the rate from the default pricelist on the opportunity. Step 3: Now the Salesperson opens the Quote Line Details to add more lines in case needed. For this, I prefer adding one line to each role and adjusting the quantities appropriately to reach the quote amount. Step 4: After the Quote is ready and the negotiations are done with the client, we proceed to win the Quote, which does the following: Marks the Quote as won Creates the contract automatically with all the information in the quote (using an OOB feature) Automatically marks the related Opportunity Won. This is done via a flow which looks for the Opportunity from where the Quote was created and marks it as won. This is typically a manual process in PSA, but using Power Automate, users can also first navigate to the opportunity and mark it as won. Conclusion This process demonstrates the power of Power Automate flows and how much time they can save for a salesperson. The regular process takes lots of clicks and entries to be done right and hence is time consuming when done manually. Power Apps also helps you improve the UI and enrich the look and feel of the app. It also helps in reducing the navigation between entities and thus saves a lot of time.

Problem Statement: D365 Sales on CRM in general has ability to revise Quotes to track the Quotes revision. In sales, the process was to Activate the Quote, and then you get option to Revise Quote which will create the Copy of Quote with new revision number in Draft state. In Project Service quotes, we don’t see the option to Activate Quote or Revise Quote. Solution: Steps to Revise Quote in Project Service Quotes. Close the Quote as Lost using the button – “Close as Lost” Then you can see the button – “Revise Quote” This action will revise the quote with new Revision Number.

Overview: Often you miss doing your time entries in PSA for the work done and go on a leave! You either then need to just struggle to find a system and do it yourself or raise some other kind of request to make sure billing is done right. But, you can delegate time entries to a colleague and it is all taken care of. Assigning Delegates in PSA: In Project Service, you can see the entity Delegates. In this entity, all you need to do is create a Delegate record as shown below You can either delegate a fellow resource for Time Entries or for the Expense entries. In this case, I’ll let Somesh make Time Entries on my behalf and hence make him my Delegate in PSA for a week on which I’m on PTO. Entering Time Entries as Delegates: Now, looking at Somesh’s angle, if he has needs to make time entries on my behalf. He would need to go to Time Entries, then he will need to look at the ribbon for his name and change the user to Priyesh Wagh. Once the other user is selected, their Timesheet appears and all the time entries by the other user appear. Here, Somesh can make time entries just as he would usually do for himself and they would actually be registered for the Resource Priyesh Wagh.

Introduction: We often get issues raised by Users while training PSA – Amount entered on Expense Entry is not reflecting on Invoice in T&M Project and instead shown as $0 as below. Resolution: We need to configure PSA correctly and check below configurations. 1. Sales Price List of Project is configured with Category Prices and not as shown below 2. Cost Price List of Organization Unit is configured with Category Prices and not as shown below 3. Amount in Chargeability View of Project Contract Line should have values in Sales Price Column of Chargeable Categories for expenses and not as shown below Conclusion: Zero Amount issue get resolved after configuring Category Prices in Price List and Chargeability View of Contract Line correctly and results are as shown below