In AX 2009, with the PSA module installed, it had a very good mechanism for creating on-account lines/prepayments against a project which allowed you to enter a total amount, specified a start date, and state the number of periods you wanted. The functionality will then automatically create the required lines, split equally to the entered amount.

Can we bring back this functionality on the existing on-account form on Dynamics 365 FO, this will improve the user experience when creating many on-account lines. Again this is even more important, now that we have the ability for straight line revenue recognition. 

This can be very useful in subscription type businesses where you want to use fixed price projects as the engine for billing and revenue recognition. 

Summary of functionality as it was:

A button on the on-account form, 'new schedule', as an additional mass creation mechanism instead of manual lines. 

• The form held temporary values and allowed for the data to be amended up until the user was satisfied and then use the 'Write schedule' option which then created it in the on-account form.

• The form had the following field groups
  
  
  
  • Schedule type
  
  
  • Contract value
  
  
  
  

• Fields available on the form
  
  
  
  • Amount
  
  
  • Start date
  
  
  • Periods
  
  
  • Date interval
  
  
  
  


• Buttons available
  
  
  
  • Update
  
  
  • Reset
  
  
  • Write schedule
  
  
  
  

Field group options:

• Fixed - Allowed the split of the transaction to be based on equal amounts


• Percentage - Allowed the split of the transaction to be based on percentage.

Fields available:

• Amount - Allow the user to enter the total amount to split in the billing currency of the contract e.g. 360,000


• Start date:- allow the selection of the start date.


• Periods - Enter the number of periods desired for the amount to be split up. e.g. 3 means it creates 3 months, if the Date interval is set to MONTHLY


• Date Interval - available values MONTHLY,WEEKLY, YEARLY, QUARTERLY,

Buttons available:

• UPDATE - will create the lines in a simple grid in the form. The grid had the following column headings:
  
  
  
  • Payment date - The date for the invoice (this could then be amended individually)
  
  
  • Percentage - stage the percentage portion of the total amount,  if the line creation had been based off a the percentage option(will only display if schedule type is set to PERCENTAGE)
  
  
  • Amount - The individual amount for that line where the 'fixed' option in the 'schedule type' has been used  (will only display if schedule type is set to FIXED). 
  
  
  • Transaction text - Allows the user to manually populate each transaction text to write onto the on-account form as the description. 
  
  
  
  

• Reset - Deletes the lines that is in the grid for the process to be re-started. 


• Write schedule - write the displayed amount back to the on-account form and automatically closes the 'schedule' form (prior to writing it back to the on-account form there is a dialog box prompt which asks the user to confirm the write-back to the project). 

There were a few controls ie the system will not allow the total of the individual lines to be more that the total specified in the 'Amount' field. Where this becomes possible because an individual amount on the temporary lines had been amended, the 'Write schedule' button becomes unavailable.

Additional improvements

• Include a default transaction text on the header of the form that can be populated and used for all lines initially before the user gets the option to over type it.