As I prepare for my Dynamics 365 certification in sales (MB2-717), I am creating blog posts based on my revision. I hope that collectively these posts may prove useful to anyone also preparing for the MB2-717 exam. In this post I will focus on built in reports.
You can see an extract of the skills measured statement below including a reference to built-in reporting in the “Manage sales by using sales analysis tools” section of the exam.
Built in Reports
Microsoft Dynamics 365 contains multiple out of the box reports. Access to these can be found in the reporting option in the sales area.
A similar option is available in the sitemap navigation for service, marketing and project service! Therefore reports can cover all aspects of Dynamics 365 but many of them have a sales focus. Below is a list of the sales related out of the box reports. (I have removed marketing and service specific reports.)
| Name | Description |
| Account Distribution | Identify patterns in top revenue-generating accounts. |
| Account Overview | View a one-page overview of an account. |
| Account Summary | View a chronological summary of an account. |
| Competitor Win Loss | Compare how your sales team performs against competitors. |
| Invoice | View an invoice and its line items. |
| Invoice Status | View your accounts receivable. |
| Lead Source Effectiveness | Compare your lead sources. |
| Neglected Accounts | Identify accounts that have not been contacted recently. |
| Neglected Leads | Identify leads that have not been contacted. |
| Order | View an order and its line items. |
| Products By Account | View products that are used by an account. |
| Products By Contact | View products that are used by a contact. |
| Progress against goals | View progress against goals |
| Quote | View a quote and its line items. |
| Sales History | Understand past sales performance. |
| Sales Pipeline | View anticipated potential sales. |
Selecting a report will initially provide a dialog to allow the report content to be filtered. Below is an example of the sales pipeline report;
Clicking run report will then generate a report and display the results. Once the report is displayed you can further filter and group the data. For example, with the sales pipeline report I can filter by sales process, group by date, rating, sales stage (etc) and opt to display estimated revenue or weighted revenue.
Reported can also be exported as XML files, CSV files, PDF, MTHML, Excel, Tiff or Word. Or you could just print it!
You should remember that when running reports, the Dynamics 365 security model will still apply, each report will only ever contain data that can be accessed using your role. A sales manager (for example) might be able to report on his team. Whilst an individual sales person will remain limited to just their own opportunities / accounts.
Another approach to running reports is to navigate to the entity and select the report from a list view. Below you can see that I have selected the “My Active Accounts” view and I can run the account overview, account summary and products by account on the selected accounts. Or I can run the sales history report against all accounts.
Running the Account Overview report with one account selected initially presents the dialog below.
Once an option is selected the report is generated and displayed as it was when run from the reports option. As I opted to run the record against all applicable records I can page from account to account. My report is shown below. Although notice that the counter initially says 1 of 2?, the question mark is because the total number of records isn’t known to the report but does update as you page forward.
A third method to access reports exists. Here you can see that I have opened an individual order and I can run the “Order” report directly from the order form.
My test order looked like this ……
In addition to the out of the box reports, users can create additional reports using the report wizard or developers can create reports tailored exactly to the company’s requirements. The creation of custom reports will not be covered in the MB2-717 exam! I believe it should be enough just to know that creating custom reports is available.
Hopefully this post has given you an insight into the out of the box reports available in Dynamics 365. As part of you prep for the MB2-717 I encourage you to run multiple actual reports! You should become familiar with what reports are available, how they can be run and what export options exist.