Enhanced experience to add products

Today is a bit of a milestone for me, because this is my 100th article! Now let’s get on with it! If you are using Dynamics 365 Sales, then you have noticed that adding products to an opportunity, a quote, an order or an invoice is a bit of a drag. We have to add the products one by one, unless we use the suggestions feature that allows users to pick any products that have a relationship to the selected opportunity product to cross sell, upsell, use as a substitute or sell as an accessory. The issue here is when the sales rep needs to add products that are not in that suggestions list, as they will have to manually add them one by one by using the quick create form. Microsoft is working on a way to fix this. Today you can enable the preview feature that allows for a new enhanced experience which gives users a better way to view, compare, filter and add multiple products with less clicks. As stated before, please note that this is a preview feature which means this is not a completed feature yet. The preview functionality allows us to review the feature and provide Microsoft with feedback and improvement suggestions prior to general availability.

In order to enable the preview feature you need to open the Sales Hub app and navigate to the ‘App Settings’ area. On the top of the page you’ll see a slider that reads ‘Add Products (preview)’ which you can turn to ‘Preview Enabled’. Once the preview is enabled you’ll notice the customization options. Under ‘Customize Columns’ you’ll be able to add columns to the different product views. Keep in mind that there are separate product views for Opportunity products, Quote Products, Order Products and Invoice Products so you’ll need to modify each individual view that you want to change. I like the fact that you don’t have to go dig around to find the correct view, the links on the page take you directly to the corresponding product view for each table in the new maker experience. If you’re more comfortable using the legacy designer, you can click on the ‘Switch to classic’ button and modify the view there just like you would do any other view.

When you turn this feature on you’ll notice the ‘Add Product’ button on the opportunity, quote, order and invoice forms will be replaced by a new button called ‘Add Products‘. The way this new experience works is that when a user clicks on the ‘Add Products’ button another window will open up on top of the existing window, showing a list of products to choose from. As mentioned above, this preview feature also comes with some configuration options where you have the ability to add columns to the list of products and even add related information from the product table to the view.

Under ‘Show more details on the Product cell’ you’ll notice the ability to configure the ‘Product lookup’ view. This is where you can add related columns from the Product table to the products view. When you click the ‘Customize Product Lookup’ link it will take you to a view called ‘Product Lookup View’ in the make.powerapps.com experience. This is where you can add additional columns to the view. To add columns to this view, click the ‘+View column’ and select the column you want to add. The columns in this view will show below the Product lookup column/cell in the ‘Add Products’ window that pops open when the ‘Add Products’ button is clicked as shown in the image below. By default the ‘Product Name’ and ‘Product ID’ columns have already been added to the view, and you’ll notice the second column (product id) shows in a smaller font underneath the product column in the ‘Add Products’ window. Keep in mind that you can show a maximum of 3 columns in the product column. In the below image you’ll see the three columns in the Product cell. Unlike the product views for each table, this view only has to be updated once and it will show on the different views for opportunities, quotes, orders and invoice products.

When end users click the ‘Add Products’ button the ‘Add Products’ window opens on top of the existing form. From this screen users have the ability to search for products, view recently used products, add products and create write-in products. On the left side of the screen users will be able to pick a product family and see all the related child products of that product family. Obviously if your products are not setup with a product family, these will not be visible. Users can also click on the drop down in the search bar to view and navigate to a product family. In order to add any products all the user has to do is enter the quantity per product and clicking the ‘Add’ button next to the product.

When a user clicks on the ‘Recently Used’ tab they will be able to see all of the products they have recently accessed. From that view they will also be able to add products quickly. This can be very handy if sales people sell certain products on a regular basis.
Another option that sales users have is to add write-in products. This can come in handy when a product is not available in the catalog. Users can add write-in products by clicking on the ‘+ Write-in product’ button on the left side of the screen and adding a product name, unit, price per unit and quantity. Clicking the ‘Add’ button creates the product and adds it to the related opportunity, quote, order or invoice. If a user wants to see the products that have already been added, they can click on the ‘Selected’ button on the top right of the ‘Add Products’ window.

If a pricelist is selected for the corresponding opportunity or quote the user will see the corresponding sales price in the ‘Price per unit’ field. This information comes from the related pricelist. I noticed that if there is no pricelist selected some of the items in the list have unit prices and others have not. I noticed that if a product has two pricelists attached then no price per unit is shown. Users with the right privileges are able to manually enter a price if needed, however this might now be optimal. For this reason I would suggest that an opportunity or quote should always have a pricelist attached.

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