Categorising Accounts

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Posted on by GingerSteve

Hi,

We are about to move into production with CRM (2016 online, update 1), but I have an ongoing challenge that I can’t get my head around. I have posted a similar question previously, but as yet we’re yet to find a satisfactory option.

We have a (pretty common I would think) scenario where we need to classify accounts into business ‘sectors’. Each sector is a multi-level (as many as 4) hierarchy. For example:

Computing > Consumer > Hardware > Hard Drives

Computing > Industrial > Hardware > Hard Drives

Computing > Consumer > Software > OS

Computing > Consumer > Software > Productivity

Obviously there are more than that, but you get the idea. Key requirements are that:

Each account can have more than sector assigned to it.
Sectors can be assigned at any level. E.g., one account may have Computing > Consumer > Software > OS assigned to it, which another that we know less about might have only Computing > Consumer assigned to it.

My key challenges are:

How can we incorporate the assignment into the accounts form? The user needs to be able to select level 1, then level 2, then level 3…. and at any point assign the sector and either stop or assign another.
We need to structure the setup such that if someone completing an advanced find selected Computing > Consumer they would get all accounts assigned to that sector and more granular sectors, but if that searched for accounts assigned to the bottom level Computing > Consumer > Software > Productivity they would get only those.

I have setup a recursively referenced custom entity and then related that (N:N) with account, but it doesn’t satisfactorily meet either of the two above requirements.

I can’t use the in-build category entity as it’s not possible to add a N:N relationship between that and account.

Any thoughts on either or both of the points?

Many thanks,

Steve

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Answers (2)

Drew Poggemann 4 on at

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RE: Categorising Accounts

There is always a better way :) Glad it helped for you here...

Thanks,
GingerSteve on at

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RE: Categorising Accounts

Hi Drew,

Thanks for your help on this one. I finished trialling the option out this morning and it works well.

I think there could be a slightly better implementation of the assignment process, but that's a limitation of the controls/tools available I think.

Thanks again for your assistance!

Steve
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Drew Poggemann 4 on at

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RE: Categorising Accounts

Hi Steve, did this provide you the information you needed? If so, please verify. Thanks much!
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Drew Poggemann 4 on at

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RE: Categorising Accounts

Hi Steve,

I implemented this on my side to test and here is some more thoughts (after implementing):

1. Name field should be manually set with how you want to display in the subgrid so you should set this to something like the category path for each entry manually (can obviously load this through csv import to make easier)

2. Add Group Name field which would be the "Technology" value that I had above

3. The Code value would then be a CONCAT(new_groupname, new_field1Id, new_field2Id, new_field3Id, new_field4Id)

Example of Categorization Entity List

Account Form with Categorizations

Search within Grid

The search within the grid shows all the entries that are at that level or a child of that level. I think this is what you are looking for? I was even able to do a wildcard as shown below.

Hope this works. Seemed to work well for me.

Please mark verified if this answers your question.

Thanks,
GingerSteve on at

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RE: Categorising Accounts

Hi Drew,

Thanks for such an excellent and detailed reply.

This will work well for us, I'm going to give it a try.

My only follow-up question actually relates to data entry. I want to add the Categorization entity as a sub-grid, primarily on the accounts form. What I would then ideally like is for the user to be able to add levels and only see options applying to the previous level. I think I could do this with linked lookups, but it could be a little cumbersome for 4 levels. Any thoughts on how best to achieve a good data entry? I had wondered about looking at a self-completing option on the full category path, but realistically that requires good knowledge of the categories beforehand.

Thanks again!

Steve
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Drew Poggemann 4 on at

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RE: Categorising Accounts

Hi Steve,

I read through your challenge here and my approach may be a bit "non-conventional" but I think it would work well.

Create an entity called "Categorization" that will be used to define a multiple level hierarchy and it will also be generic and be able to be used for multiple different entities / situations based on a couple of fields.

Example entity fields could be:

1. Categorization Name - Unique name that would be duplicated for all records within the category tree

2. Level1ID - Numeric value for the first level of categorization

3. Level1Desc - Display name for the categorization

4. Level2ID

5. Level2Desc

Repeat for number of levels you would like to create, my example shows 4 below...

6. Code - This would be setup as a calculated field that will concatenate the ID values for each level. Example is CONCATENATE(Level1ID, Level2ID, ...)

The following table shows a relative example of the data that would be setup in this categorization model

As you can see with the data above each level has a unique id for each value

Now, if you set this up and then created a 1-N connection with this entity you will be able to define multiple of these to the entity and be able to then filter utilizing the code to show multiple levels with the "starts with" concept.

Basically if you did an advanced find for all accounts and you want to find ones that were setup with OMS you could look for "Technology-100200" and it will find all of them whether they are at that level or at the more specific levels below that. If you want to look for all that are OMS Data Center then you could look for "Technology-100200200".

I didn't show above but you could have a second calculated field that would be the level descriptions as well that would be something like CONCATENATE(Level1Desc, "->", Level2Desc, "->", ...).

Hopefully this is something that would work for you... Let me know your thoughts and mark verified if it solves your need.

Thanks,
Ryan Maclean 3,070 on at

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RE: Categorising Accounts

Hi Steve,

In my implementation I can't do that, as that was not one of our requirements. We categorise all of our accounts down to one specific path and end-point to minimise confusion and help with our reporting. Our concern was that if we had 100 Accounts, we didn't then want to find that we have 75 with Level 1A and 50 with Level 1B (so 125 in total out of 100 accounts). How many sectors can you apply to an Account in your deployment?

In terms of the reporting/advanced find it absolutely works to find all accoutns at any tier/option, or any of the more granular options.

You may be able to do an amalgamation of this approach and a set of filtered lookups if you need to apply more than one sector to an Account potentially
GingerSteve on at

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RE: Categorising Accounts

Hi Ryan,

Ah, thanks! This looks promising. In your implementation are you able to assign multiple categories to each account? And I guess you can then report/find all accounts with either the selected category tier or any of the more granular related ones?

Many thanks,

Steve
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Ryan Maclean 3,070 on at

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RE: Categorising Accounts

Hi Steve,

I had a similar situation to you on my system where we had to categorise our Accounts by into one of three "tiers" based on their business type. We used the a tree kind of like the one below to categorise them at a high-level first, then into one of the options, then a refined sub-option as we had enough information on them to make the distinction:

We accomplished this by using dependent OptionSets (picklists) on the Account form, which kept it pretty clean. This can be achieved using the sample on the MSDN at https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg594433.aspx.

I would however recommend using the Dependent OptionSet Generator created by Guido Preite at http://crmoptionsets.azurewebsites.net/ if this is an approach you wish to take.

This would satisfy all of your requirements I think.

Ryan
GingerSteve on at

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RE: Categorising Accounts

Hi All,

Thank your for your responses and suggestions.

KK, that sounds like a possible option. I'll give that a go and let you know how it works out.

Many thanks!

Steve