Fiscal Year Settings and Sales Quotas in CRM 3.0

  • Article

I see a few partners asking how to go about setting Fiscal Year settings and a few more wanting to know what impact it has with the application. So I decided to write-up a bit on this topic.

Fiscal Year Settings in CRM 3.0

Fiscal Year settings basically provide you the capability to report on Sales Quota for every CRM Sales User. Effectiveness of your Sales Force can be measured with Sales Quotas.

Fiscal Year settings have to be set to be able to use the Sales Quota feature in CRM. Fiscal Period options once set cannot be changed. So you need to take extra care when settings these options in CRM. Double-check before saving the options for Fiscal period.

There are five templates available to configure the Fiscal Period:

  • Monthly
  • Quarterly
  • 4 Weekly
  • Semi annual
  • Annual

Fiscal Year Display in the application can be controlled by two dropdowns available in the Fiscal Year Settings Web Dialog:

  • Fiscal Year and
  • Name Based on

'Fiscal Year' controls how the Fiscal Year is presented in the application viz.

Format - Example

  • yyyy - 2007
  • Yy - 07
  • FY yyyy - FY 2007
  • FYyyyy - FY2007
  • FY yy - FY 07
  • FYyy - FY07

'Name Based On' controls how the company might want to name or represent their Financial Year. For example, if the Fiscal Year of the Company starts from April, 2006 and runs till March 2007, then the company may either call that as FY06 or FY07. Based on how they want to name it, you can configure this option to use Start Date or End Date.

‘Fiscal Period’ is used to configure how the fiscal period is denoted in the application. The options include:

  • P1
  • Period 1
  • Q1
  • Quarter 1
  • M1
  • Month 1
  • S1
  • Semester 1

‘Display As’ defines how the combined representation of fiscal year and fiscal period would be. The choices available are:

  • P1 FYyy (with space)
  • P1FFyy (without space)
  • P1-FFyy (with hyphen)
  • P1/FFyy (with slash)

 

Sales Quotas and their Usage:

Sales Quotas are used to measure the productivity of a salesperson every fiscal period. Sales Quotas can be assigned to Sales Users via the ‘User Settings’ option under ‘Business Unit Settings’ . Quotas can also be managed from within ‘Salespersons with Quotas’ under ‘Business Unit Settings’

Unfortunately, there is no report available in CRM 3.0 that can display Sales Quota information for a user out-of-the-box. We can write a custom SQL Reporting Services Report that pulls this information from the ‘UserFiscalCalendarBase’ table in the MSCRM database.

That sounds weird! Yeah, but I am not sure why this report is not available in CRM 3.0. It was available with CRM 1.2 though.

Regards,

pk