Prospect-to-cash overview
The prospect-to-cash scenario that’s available in dual-write engages customers and contacts. It continues the business relationship throughout the process by processing quotations, or order processing workflows, until the financials are reconciled and recognized. This integration between Dynamics 365 Sales and Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management makes the quotation and order processes available in both apps. Sales quotations, sales orders, and invoices that are created from sales orders are examples of documents that are exchanged through prospect-to-cash, dealing with released products (with or without product variants), write-in products, and base price lists.
You can use item availability from Sales when determining whether the item is physically available on-hand from the product, quote, or order. Likewise, you can do the same process for an item that’s available-to-promise. If the item-specific delivery date controls have been set up, they’ll also be integrated when you insert a line from Supply Chain Management through dual-write.
For example, you can start with Sales and find a product. On that product, you can view the list price that’s available from Supply Chain Management, along with the amount that’s available on hand and a price list. Additionally, you’ll be able to determine which warehouse that the product is available in. If you have an account, you can add notes to transfer from Sales to the Supply Chain Management customer accounts with the integration for dual-write. If you add a new order for a customer account, the order header will be created in Supply Chain Management, almost simultaneously. Moreover, adding a product to the lines of the order is integrated within seconds. Prices, discount prices, and processing status will sync between the systems as you process the order in either system.
Pricing strategies
For calculation and synchronization of the prices and discounts, the guiding principle is that finance and operations apps holds the master values. Whatever monetary value exists for sales quotations, leading to a sales order or invoice, finance and operations apps will have the correct value. Occasionally, these values might come from external sources and integrations, but this factor doesn’t change how Dynamics 365 Sales and dual-write deal with the information. If the values are changed manually or automatically in finance and operations apps, then the integration will copy them over to Dataverse in near real time.
The initial pricing will default from the sales price against the product (if it exists). Otherwise, for more accurate pricing, you’ll need to invoke the Price Order and Price Quote buttons in Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement (on-premises) when the order entry is complete to update the information. After running the Calculate Sales Totals job with recurrence, this process will also ensure that the Customer Engagement representation of the Supply Chain Management source pricing is correct as changes occur during the order life cycle.
If the line is first created in Supply Chain Management, the initial prices will be correct, and the Calculate Sales Totals job with recurrence will ensure that Sales pricing is correct as well.
The Trade Agreement Evaluation Policy for Manual Entry can play an important role in scenarios where the line is created from Sales and the default price isn't equal to zero. No price is searched in the line creation in this instance because the unit price will never be overwritten as part of the Price Order and Price Quote functionalities.
Inventory availability and available-to-promise
The integration between Supply Chain Management and Sales through dual-write for inventory on hand is relatively straightforward. The On-hand inventory buttons in both systems allow for a call to get the correct amount of inventory. The available-to-promise inventory is slightly more convoluted because extra steps and calculations occur. You can calculate the quantity of the available-to-promise inventory by using a cumulative, look-ahead method. For more information, see Order promising - ATP calculations.
Notes integration
finance and operations apps includes attachments, which can be anything from a URL, a file, or an internal or external note.
The integration of notes from Sales to Supply Chain Management are supported, and you can use them for both Customer and Sales Order header entities. Essentially, notes that you’ve saved in Sales for either entity can be viewed in Supply Chain Management and vice versa. When you create a note in Sales and integrate it over dual-write, the note will appear as an internal note in Supply Chain Management. When you create a URL or internal note in Supply Chain Management, the note will be saved in Sales.
Key limitations for pricing, available inventory, and notes
Line net amount isn't a mapped field, which implies that Supply Chain Management line net amount values aren't synched to Sales. A line item in Supply Chain Management that only has a set amount and no unit price won’t have a line price synched over to Sales. Therefore, no extended amount will be shown for that line item in Sales. In integration scenarios, make sure that you always have a unit price to ensure proper insight from a Sales perspective. The totals will be calculated correctly, but the line information that’s displayed in Sales won’t be aligned with Supply Chain Management.
Off invoice values are synched only, whereas monetary values that are related to entities, such as rebates or any kind of bill backs, aren’t synched. Delivery date control is checked according to the policy when the quote and order line is entered in Supply Chain Management. You can’t change the delivery date control policy that’s set for the item in Supply Chain Management from Sales during the line entry.
Supply Chain Management leads and opportunities aren’t supported, and the relationship type of Prospect isn’t supported out of the box. However, a custom map for prospects is available.
Only sales orders of the type Sales order are supported. The sales order types for journal, subscription, item requirements, and returned order aren’t supported in the dual-write integration.
Intercompany is also not supported by the dual-write integration. For more information, see Prospect-to-cash in dual-write.