Hack #19: Understanding PRICE LISTS in D365 Project Operations

Applies To: Project Operations for resource/non-stocked based scenarios, Lite deployment – deal to proforma invoicing.

Another Monday for another hack, let’s uncover the many layers of Price Lists!

There are 3 types of price lists (Project Operations calls this CONTEXT):

-COST

-SALES

-PURCHASE

To keep it short and sweet, this layot explains what is the function of each price list:

*Breakdown of the CONTEXT aka: Price Lists types*

Important: Rates are based on ROLES and not a specific resource/individual (unless you mess with more advanced settings like pricing dimensions). Later I will talk about some scenarios and what we can do to address them.

Before we start working with price lists, you must have these depencies in place:

–Roles – Microsoft learn: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/project-operations/resource-management/define-roles

I don’t want to dive into all the details but I will provide an example of how to set a ROLE:

–Organization Units – Microsoft learn: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/project-operations/sales/orgunits

Note: I can write three or more blogs on how to set and use Organizational Units, but I will share these in later posts as they can cover a lot of ground.

Here’s a good rule of thumb checklist when you start settint Price Lists up, and they should be done in sequence to avoid issues:

1-Set the Organizational Units.

2-Have Active Bookable Resources in the system, to begin with.

3-Have these Resources associated with the proper Organizational Unit.

4-Create the Roles needed for your scenario. Create all of them before moving to the next step.

5-First create your COST Price List, where you will define all the Role Prices in it. Secondly, have a second person check your work and make sure you have all the roles (see if the # of records match) and that everything else, like descriptions and especially the rates.

6-COPY the COST Price List to recreate your first SALES one. The idea of copying it is that you will use the correct list (less double work), so the CONTEXT and ROLE PRICES alone will need to be changed.

7-Super important! Do I run test by creating a fake Project and including all these roles (they could be Generic Resources) and linking a Quote against it to see that the amount of the value shows up (no zeroes) and that all is good for both COST and SALES. I will provide more details on this one in the near future!

Cost vs Sales Price lists

Conceptually, it is important to understand that all of these options have essentially the same fields and data captured.

The only difference is how we set the context with either COST, SALES or PURCHASE types.

Ignoring PURCHASE for a moment, COST and SALES can be considered the most essential ones to get us started in Project Operations, and it is important to consider that these two can be ‘linked’ to a Customer (Sales only), Quote or Project Contract at different stages, as below: