Your CRM does what? (Part 4 of 4 – Extending Orders)

By Todd Fleming

Senior Consultant

BroadPoint Technologies

In Part 4 of a 4 part series on extending your CRM application, we will take a look at functionality we added to the CRM Orders process in Microsoft Dynamics CRM and via integration to Microsoft Dynamics GP for a few of our clients.

Credit Card Verification

A requirement that some customers have is the ability to be able to accept credit card payments in Dynamics CRM at the time of the order. We have accomplished this goal in the past by customizing the Order to include a new tab called "Payment Info" with all of the necessary fields for Credit Card processing. The sales person enters all of the credit card information and clicks on the submit payment button which then sends this information to the client's credit card processor for authorization. Payments are authorized in real time and authorization numbers are written back to Dynamics CRM in the Payment Tab's payment status field. For clients that are integrating Dynamics CRM Orders with Dynamics GP Accounting we integrate both the Order and the Payment so no double keying is required.

Freight Calculation

Most of our clients sell and ship products using various carriers. Additional functionality can be added to the Dynamics CRM Order such that information about the order can be sent to FedEx or UPS to determine the actual shipping costs for the Order so that you do not have to estimate shipping costs. The weight and size for a product can be captured at the product level in Dynamics CRM and can be totaled at the Order level which will provide a more accurate shipping cost. Clients typically add a shipping and handling fee to this amount which can be done as a percentage of the overall freight cost or as a flat fee added to the actual freight cost. This information can then be integrated from Dynamics CRM to Dynamics GP.

Bar-coding

In a retail operation you may not have time to perform the necessary steps to create an order in Dynamics CRM. For one of our retail clients that already had their inventory bar-coded we worked with their existing bar coding hardware in order to add line items to a CRM order by simply scanning the bar code of the items the customer was purchasing.

Integration

Available Credit: One of the standard integration points between Microsoft Dynamics GP and Microsoft Dynamics CRM is the mapping of the credit limit field. While this information is useful it does not tell you how much available credit a customer has. In order to determine the available credit in Microsoft Dynamics GP you have to consider open orders, invoiced orders, returns, credits, payments etc. We've created a view for the available credit and integrate this back into Microsoft Dynamics CRM so that you can view a customer's credit limit, current account balance and available credit. If the customer has exceeded their available credit we can hide the Submit Order button preventing the order from being submitted and processed until the customer's available credit is higher than the order total.

Returns: One of our clients had the need to be able to initiate a return within Microsoft Dynamics CRM. The order and integration was customized such that an order could be created with negative quantity items and this information could then be integrated to Microsoft Dynamics GP for processing.