A common question is how do I get the data out of Salesforce? Views are nice, but sometimes you need to have a good report to export or schedule to email to team members weekly. We’ll do a simple custom report here.
This is an oldie but a goodie, so kind of rehashing a two-year-old tip here for your pleasure. This is how we can add a list view to your Home Page, so you can see things like leads, opportunities, etc., right from the home page. We’ll use the Leads object in this example:
This post is a fun one–we’ll be uploading your organization’s logo to your instance of Dynamics 365. Easy. High-impact. Gotta love it! Bonus: we’ll upload a profile picture, too.
If you’ve always wanted to change the Main Tile names in your Dynamics CRM instance, you are in luck! One awesome new feature in Dynamics 365 is the ability to rename the Main Tiles. This new enhancement is so great for clients with different Business Units (Residential vs Commercial, Private vs Public, etc) or internal lingo that doesn’t jive with the default labels. We’ll also be touching on making changes to the Site Map–I’ll continue that discussion in the next blog.
We all know how frustratingly slow it can be to jump around between different entities, contacts, leads, opportunities in Dynamics..oy! In this post we’ll be discussing a very helpful new feature in Dynamics 365: “Pinning” Entities and Records in the “Recently Viewed Items” drop-down. You can actually pin Views, too!
Did you know that you can use Zoho CRM to track your inventory? Tracking your inventory involves the following modules:
- Products
- Quotes (optional)
- Sales Orders (optional)
- Invoices
- Pricebooks (optional)
- Vendors
- Purchase Orders
The Products module has the following fields for inventory tracking:
- Quantity in Stock
- incremented by a delivered Purchase Order
- decremented by invoice (on create)
- Quantity Ordered
- incremented by a created Purchase Order
- decremented by a delivered Purchase Order
- Quantity in Demand
- incremented by a Created Sales Order
- decremented by a converted Sales order
- Re-order Level – set to receive re-order alerts
Details on how it works:
- Initialize your Product records and enter your initial Quantity in Stock, and Pricing values
- PURCHASING
- Create a Purchase Order and add a product as a line item with a quantity
- zoho automatically adds the quantity listed in the purchase order to the Quantity Ordered field in the product record.
- When the products are received, mark the Purchase Order as “Delivered”
- zoho automatically subtracts the quantity form the Quantity Ordered field and adds it to the Quantity in Stock field
- Set a Re-order level and get alerts when inventory dips below established levels.
- Create a Purchase Order and add a product as a line item with a quantity
- SELLING
- Optional – Create a Quote Record, add the product(s) as line items with a quantity. (Quotes do NOT affect product inventory!)
- Optional – Create a Sales Order Record (or convert a Quote to a Sales Order) with line items (products with prices and quantities)
- zoho automatically increments the Quantity in Demand field by the quantity listed in the Sales Order for all products listed as line items in a Sales Order
- Create an invoice (or convert a Quote or Sales Order to an invoice)
- zoho automatically decrements the Quantity in Stock field by the quantity listed in the invoice for all products listed as line items in Invoice
Using this part of Zoho CRM is a great compliment to Quickbooks Online (which does not have inventory tracking). Simply push your invoices to Quickbooks online (through Zoho’s Quickbooks Connector) for billing and tracking.
I’m a huge fan of “My” style views. However, what do you do if you have multiple user fields on a form. Maybe a “outside rep, inside rep, engineer” type of situation? Had a similar case with a client where we had multiple users on an opportunity. Not just the owner, but OTHER users which we wanted to see these opportunities when on the “My Opportunities” type of view. So, we created a formula checkbox which turns true when the user is listed in any one of the fields. Here’s the code for the formula:
IF( Owner.Id = $User.Id ||
Salesrep__r.Id = $User.Id ||
Salesrep_Add_l__r.Id = $User.Id ||
Sales_Rep_Additional_2__r.Id = $User.Id ||
Engineer__r.Id = $User.Id ||
$UserRole.Name = "Sales Manager"
, TRUE, FALSE)
It’s long IF/THEN formula, but it’s basically evaluating if the current user is in the rep1, rep additional, the rep2 additional field, or engineer field. I won’t go into how you make the formula field as that’s pretty straight forward.
Once you’ve got this, just change the “My Opportunities” view to be “All opportunities” but where the field is TRUE (in the image below, we just changed the “opportunities” module to “projects”, hence the difference).
Got a client that didn’t like the existing calendars and activity lists on the home page. So, what we did was add in a custom tab (at the top) that actually just loads the calendar page by itself. It’s pretty easy to do actually – here’s how (we’re doing the “activities list” as the example here).
This one gets a bit above me, but we have to start with a visual force page. Go to the setup area, search on “visual force” and choose “Visual force pages”.
Then click “New” at the top to create a new one. Give it a label, a name, etc. The markup is the kicker and that’s where we need to put this in here:
<apex:page action="/00U/c">
Please wait...
</apex:page>
For calendar, use the code above, for activities, use this:
<apex:page action="/007">
Please wait...
</apex:page>
Save it and we’re about half way there. Now we need to find “tabs” under “create” in the setup tree.
Scroll to the “visualforce tabs” section near the bottom of the screen. Click New.
Choose your page (the activity or calendar page), give it a name, etc.
Choose the visability rules on the next page couple of pages and you’re all set.
As you are probably aware, Dynamics CRM is undergoing some changes and one of them is a new name, Dynamics 365. My blog posts this month will focus on some of the functionality updates available in v8.2 and our next meetup will review them in more detail. Be sure to sign up and join us!
Another cool, new feature is that you can group by fields directly from a view within CRM. You don’t have to create a report or export to Excel to group the data. In the customizations area, click on the name of the entity then open the Controls tab.
Then add a control and choose Editable Grid.
Finally, choose which devices you want to be able to use the editable grid control. Save and publish your changes.
Navigate to the entity and you will now see a box where you can specify how to group the records in the view. The options will be limited to the fields seen in the view. For example, if you want to group by State or Province you will need to add this field to the view first.
As you are probably aware, Dynamics CRM is undergoing some changes and one of them is a new name, Dynamics 365. My blog posts this month will focus on some of the functionality updates available in v8.2 and our next meetup will review them in more detail. Be sure to sign up and join us!
Historically, when you have activities associated with a custom entity, those activities do not roll up to the related account. This can be frustrating because you aren’t able to get the full picture from the account like you’d expect. Now you’re able to specify if activities roll up from custom entities. Open the relationship screen between the account and your custom entity. There will be an option to change the Rollup View from Cascade None to Cascade All. Save and publish your changes and you’re all set!
