Pricing and costing dimensions home page

Important

Dynamics 365 Project Service Automation has evolved into Dynamics 365 Project Operations. For more information, see Project Service Automation Transition.

The dimensions used to set labor pricing and costing in project-based organizations are influenced by the following attributes:

  • People doing work similar to their experience, role, or geography
  • Work to be performed similar to its complexity or time of day

Given the typical nature of these attrubutes of the work and the people required to perform the work, there are two types of pricing dimension values available in Project Service Automation:

  • Option sets - Attributes that are fixed enumerations for a set of values.
  • Entity-based values - Attributes that can have a varied set of values that are finite but can change over time.

Pricing dimensions

PSA ships with a default set of pricing dimensions. You can view these by going to Project Service > Parameters. In the parameter record, on the Amount-based pricing dimensions tab, verify that the role, msdyn_resourcecategory and resourcing organizational unit, msdyn_organizationalunit have the fields Applicable to sales and Applicable to cost set to Yes. This will allow you to set up the price and cost for each role and organizational unit combination.

Screenshot of Project Service parameters with “Applicable to Sales” highlighted.

Important

If you have been the using out-of-the box fields of role and organizational unit as pricing dimensions prior to version 3 of PSA, there will not be any observable change. You can continue to use Project Service as usual.

If you need to price or cost for your resources using additional attributes, you can create customized fields, entities, and dimensions. For more information, see the following articles, however note that you must complete the procedures in the order listed below:

Pricing human resource time

How an organization prices human resource time is often an important strategic consideration that directly affects the organization's profitability. Work with the finance teams and practice heads when your organization is ready to identify how it wants to set up bill and cost rates for human resource time.

Other considerations for pricing include whether to re-use fields or entities that are not currently pricing dimensions but apply as a pricing dimension for your organization. Fields like Transaction Category (msdyn_transactioncategory) and Bookable Resource (bookableresource) are examples of candidate dimensions.

Consider whether your pricing dimension should be a table or an option set. If you foresee changes to the values of a dimension which will exceed 10 or 12 and you need additional attributes on these values, create an entity rather than an option set. Maintaining an option set, such as adding or removing values, requires an admin or developer whereas adding new rows to a table can be done by most business users.

The following example shows bill rates that are set up based on the role and the resourcing org unit to which the resource belongs. Cost rates are typically based on the salary band of the employee and the org unit that they belong to. In this example, the bill rate and cost rate tables will look like the following.

Sample bill rates

Role Org Unit Unit Price Currency
Developer Contoso US Hour 200 USD
Developer Contoso India Hour 112 USD

Sample cost rates

Salary Band Org Unit Unit Price Currency
My company_Band1 Contoso US Hour 145 USD
My company_Band2 Contoso India Hour 67 USD