PSA – Quantity Factors

Project Service Automation (PSA) for Microsoft Dynamics 365 includes an extension to the product catalog that allows us to define what product properties might affect the total amount. In this post I’ll describe when this might be used and how to configure quantity factors.

Imagine you’re selling software licenses, the unit price might be £115 per user per month. On the opportunity or quotation, you will want to enter the length of the expected agreement and the number of users. So 100 users for 12 months would give me a quantity of 1200 and therefore a sales value of £138,000. You can see below that I have entered exactly this on a product line on my opportunity.

Notice that next to properties I have an edit button, clicking this will allow me to enter the number of users and number of months required.

The concept of properties on a product is a standard feature of the Dynamics 365 product catalog. Properties are defined at the product family level and become available on any product within that family. If you haven’t used product properties before you can find a description of how they operate here.

Below you can see the product that I’d added to my example opportunity. First of all, notice that I have two properties on this product. These have been inherited from its product family. In my example the properties are months and users. Also notice that these have been given a default value. As the default in my example is 3 months and 10 users, when the product is added to an opportunity the quantity would initially begin at 30.

Underneath the product properties you will see the tab heading quantity factors. Its here that we define which of the properties to consider when calculating the opportunity quantity. (or product on quantity on a quote or contract line.)

When we add a quantity factor it’s given a name and we also pick the appropriate product property. Below you can see that the “Months” quantity factor relates to the “No of Months” property.

Note:
the computer transaction field only has one option of quantity, so you do not need to set this. (Who knows, maybe in a future release additional options will be added!)

One tip here is to always ensure your product and product family have been published after making any changes. The quickest way to publish the products is from the family. As then you can use the “Publish Hierarchy” option. (When you are adding products to an opportunity you can only add published products that exist as price list items for the product price list associated with the opportunity!)

Quantity factors might not be required in many situations but I hope you can see that in some sales situations they are a useful feature. J