Microsoft Dynamics 365 | Service Management Highlights in Business Central (Demo)

Go to the original video page

I want to show you basic service management functionality in Business Central. We’re going to take a look at these items here. We’re going to look at inventory items, how those become service items. I’m going to look at a sales order to a customer, look at a contract. We’ll set that up and then we’ll do some service orders on that contract. So let’s get started.

Service Manager Role Center

Setting Up an Item

I’m logged into Business Central as a service manager and this is my role center. I see I can do a lot of the functionality just from this role center the way it is. If I want to, I can personalize it. So the first thing I want to do is let’s take a look at an item. I’ve set up this item here. This is a Kohler generator. This is an item that I purchased and then resell to my customers. It’s also the item on which I’m going to perform service. So this is a basic item in inventory. When I sell it to the customer on the sales order, it will turn into a service item. Right now I’ve got a number of service items related to this and what a service item is, is an item that’s in the field. Item that I do not own is an item owned by my customer. And this is an automated process in Business Central if you want it to be. So right now I’ve got these three service items. Again, these are items that I had in my inventory and I sold them to my customers.

Creating a Sales Order

Let’s go back to my role center. I want to create a sales order. I’m going to create a sales order to this customer here. It’s my regular customer in Business Central. Let’s look up the Kohler generator. This is the one here. I’m going to take it out of this location and a quantity of one. This is a serialized item, so I have to specify the serial number when I take it out of my inventory and send it to my customer. So we’ll do that now. These are the serial numbers I have in my system. I purchased these items from Kohler. They’re now available in my inventory. I’m going to select one of them, bring it into the sales order, then I can go ahead and ship and invoice it. Easy to do, let’s go to post. I’ll ship it and invoice it. I could ship it separately and then invoice it later.

Viewing Service Items

Now if I look at my service items, I just created a new one. So let’s take a look at it. It’s this one here. And if we look at the service item, there’s a lot more information about it, specifically about who I sold it to and where it’s currently located. So this is the customer information over here. I can drill down and get more information on the customer if I want to. If I want to, I can add additional location information to this record, it’ll make it easier for my field personnel to find the object at my customer site.

Creating a Service Contract

Now let’s create a service contract for the service item that I just sold to my customer. I can do that right here. We’ll create a service contract. I want to use a template. I have one template defined, I could have multiple ones if I wanted to, and hit OK. It’s going to fill out the contract with specifics about that from that template. I’ll look at the customer number here. This is the customer for whom I want to create the contract. I’ve got information about the customer on the contract. Now this one is all defaulted in from the template. It’s now part of the contract, but I can override it if I want to. So the next thing to do is add the service item to this contract. We’ll add the service item that we just created. You can look that up here. When I do the lookup, it’s just going to show the service items related to this customer. Here’s the one right here. We’ll just select it.

Setting Maintenance Costs

What I do is I’m creating the contract for this item and what I want to do here is I want to create the maintenance cost that I’m going to charge my client for this service. So I’m going to charge him 2500 a year. Put that in there. I got the service specified here. So this is all I’m going to have on my contract is for this one item. I can have contracts for multiple items if I want to. I’m going to go ahead and accept this contract indicating that it’s been signed by my customer and I accept that. Let’s do that. When I do that, it will lock the contract. I can open the contract if I want to, but I’m going to leave it and then I can create the first invoice on this maintenance contract. I’ve set this up for monthly billing, so I’ll go ahead and do that.

Generating Service Invoices

Let’s look at the service invoices. Here it is. Here it’s got the customer information. It was automatically created from the contract and the customer information I already have in my system. Here’s a line item here. I can then just go ahead and post this. It will become part of my receivables and it will also show up on the contract. I’m done posting that. Take a look at it later perhaps before we continue. If you like this type of content, the best way to support us and to help others find this content is to subscribe to our channel, activate the notifications and share your thoughts in the comments section below. Thank you for helping us grow this channel.

Creating a Service Order

Let’s get back to the demonstration now. Let’s go ahead and create a service order on that contract. It’s easy to do. I’ll add it here. Here’s a new service order, specify the customer. We can get rid of this detail if we want to. We can always bring it back. We’ll look up the service item related to this customer. When I do that, I’ll see just the service items for this customer. This is the one I’m interested in. So in this service order, I’m just going to perform some general maintenance. If I wanted to, I could specify who the resource was or the person, my employee that was sent out there. I could do that, record their time. I could also add items. Let’s add a service item that was used during this process. So what I’m going to do here is I’m going to take items from my inventory that the field service person decided they needed to complete. Service this item here and let’s just look up an item. Here’s a circuit board. We’re going to replace that. I’m taking it out of this location in my inventory and I just need one of those. I’ll just close it. I can keep this order open as long as I want to when I’ve completed it. In other words, I put all the labor into it that I wanted to, all the items that I wanted to. I can just go ahead and post it and I’m done. It’s posted. It’s now part of my receivables if I had an item in there. If not, it becomes a part of the service record. We’re not going to take a look at it.

Service Contract History and Ledger Entries

Let’s take a look at the service contract here and create the service invoices directly from the contracts. I can take a look at the history on this contract. Let’s look at the service ledger entries. This reflects the ledger entries associated with this contract. See those here? We took an item out, shows that another activity related to this contract. Here’s an initial invoice for the maintenance so I can access almost all the information about the contract and the service item from this contract right here. And there’s a number of standard reports that come with the system. You can easily print those out. You can also take the information from Business Central and use it in Excel or Power BI.

We took a brief look at the service management functionality built into Business Central. We looked at items. We looked at how we turn those into service items, looked at contracts, look at service orders.