Custom Entity in CRMCreate Custom Entity in CRM to Track Expenses! Okay, well maybe two custom entities…

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Surprisingly enough, Microsoft Dynamics CRM does not contain any out-of-the-box feature for expense reporting. This is surprising because typically capturing expenses goes hand in hand with the sales process. However, this absence is understandable considering the intricacies associated and more so the variance of the nuances between the ways that companies track and reimburse expenses.

Taking this into consideration, the architecture of Dynamics CRM is ideal for creating a robust expense capture, reimbursement, and tracking system.

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We will walk you through how to create a fully functional, robust, and scalable expense tracking, reimbursement, and reporting solution. Better still, we will take a “coding optional” approach by creating a custom entity for an expense header and another custom entity for expense detail.

To kick things off, we will lay out some basic requirements. Our end users will need a way to enter in the detail of any compensatory expenses. Assistants may need to enter expenses on behalf of designated users. Completed expenses are routed for approval based on territory. Finally we will need the ability to report on approved expenses versus actual sales for our customers.

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The first thing we will want to do is create a new custom entity that will act as our expense header. Please note that when we use the term header, we are really talking about general, common, and\or summarized information related to a series of expenditures.

To do this we will need to navigate to Settings -> Customizations and then click on the Customize the System option. Highlight Entities then click on the “New” icon at the top left corner of the results pane.

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On the new entity dialog we will enter the display name as Expense. Before we save our new custom entity, there are a couple of things we want to ensure. First is that we want to verify that we have selected the checkbox next to Notes (or Document management if you are integrated with SharePoint). This will allow the end user to attach receipts if necessary.

It is also a good idea to check the Activities box so we can easily track correspondence between the end user and the expense approver. Optionally, we can also leverage queues to help us manage our pending approvals, rejections, and un-submitted expenses. We can now click on the “Save” icon at the top left of the entity so we can start adding some fields.

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After we save, the Fields link in the left navigation should become enabled. We can highlight the link to display the results pane and click on the “New” icon at the top left of the results to launch the new field dialog for each of the following fields:

“Expense Number” – This will act as a unique reference to the set of expenses. For our purposes this will be an auto number field, you can choose to code something here or rather than re-invent the wheel you could use a free plugin such as the CRM 2011 Autonumbering Solution available on CodePlex.

“Total Expenses” – This will be a Currency field that will aggregate all of the raw amounts entered by the end user.

“Total Reimbursed” – This will be a Currency field that will hold sum of expenses that can be refunded. For example, your company may only pay a percentage of certain expense types of have a cap on others.

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“Date From” and “Date To” – These will be two separate Date Only fields that will represent the period of time the related expenses pertain to. Now there are a couple of options we have with these fields to improve user experience, and if you want to use some Jscript, you could always do something like this:

This will simply set the date from field to the first of the current month and the date to field to the last day of the current month.

The final field we will add to the custom entity is going to be a reference to the user in which these expenses are related. In certain scenarios, the built-in Created By field may be fine. But for our requirements, the concept is that certain users may delegate expense entry to their assistants. To further ease the user experience, we could leverage filtered lookups against teams or territories but for the purpose of this article we will keep it as a manual lookup field.

To achieve this we will add a new (Many-to-One) N:1 Relationship to the User entity. We have provided a display name of “Employee” and we set the Display Option to “Do Not Display”. We do this because for our purposes, we do not want to clutter up the user form with listings of expenses. Our viewpoint is by minimizing the number of places where people can access data, you can simplify the overall system and provide a clear approach twards the users responsibilities.

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Once we save and close the Expense entity we can move onto a new entity that will handle the details of the individual expenses.

On the new Entity dialog we will give the entity a display name of Expense Item. For our purposes, we do not need to have activities and notes available. However, there could be a need for your organization to leverage attachments, notes, and activities related to the individual expenses.

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We can now save the entity so we can jump right into our relationships and fields. We will start with the obvious relationship which is to the Expense (header) entity. Again, this will be a many-to-one relationship.

Here we will want to ensure that we do have the Display Option for the primary entity set. In our case we will leave it as the default of “Use Plural Name”. This will allow us to see all of the related expense items directly on the expense header.

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Next we will create another many-to-one relationship. This time we will want to relate an Account to the Expense item. In doing so, we can gain some extremely valuable metrics (adding valuable metrics adds value to what we bring as a technical resource).

What we want to attain is the ability to report on how much money we spend with an account compared to how much business we get. This can be further analyzed to the sales person where we report how much a sales person spends on an account in comparison to how much business we win.

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It is always worth mentioning that you will want to understand your business needs in order to create the appropriate relationships here. Additionally, anytime you create a relationship you should fully leverage the power of mappings.

In our example it makes sense to map the Employee field to the Expense item which will provide additional analytics. For more on this you can read Customizing Microsoft CRM to get the Ultimate User Experience (UX)

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Next we will want to add some fields to the Expense item.

“Expense Description” – This will be a field of type “Multiple Lines of Text” to allow the end user to comment on the expense.

“Expense Date” – This will be a Date Only field to identify when the expense took place.

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The next three fields will be used in conjunction with each other.

◦ “Refundable Amount” – This will be a read only Currency field to calculate the actual reimbursed amount.

◦ “Expense Type” – This will be an Option Set that will hold the various expense types of expenses that an end user can enter.

◦ “Expense Amount” – This will be a Decimal Number field for the amount of the expense item. For our purposes, we used a decimal number because this field may not always represent a monetary value as you will soon see.

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The Expense Types will act as the driver for how we need to handle the amount entered by the user. For example, the company may only allow up to $100 a day for Meals. If the user enters anything over 100 into the expense amount field, the refundable expense should only calculate $100. field).

Now if the user selects Mileage as the expense type, they are going to enter in the miles driven into the expense amount field (Ah ha, this is why we did not make it a currency field).

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We can then calculate the amount entered times 56.5 cents (which is the 2013 standard mileage rate) to calculate the refundable expense. We will discuss how these get populated more in part 2 of this article.

The final thing we want to accomplish, in regards to the entities, is setting up the forms in a logical and usable layout.

Keep in mind that the expense item, in this example would be an ideal place to leverage a “Copy From” feature similar to the one we wrote about in the article Get Code Snippets to Clone a Record in CRM!

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Here is an example of what our completed forms look like:

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In part 2 we will show you how to create workflows to populate form values and handle the routing of Expenses for approval. Until then, it is important to point out the implications that security will have in this process.

Additionally, when it comes to our relationship of Expense to Expense items you will need to pay close attention to how granting Append and Append to affects the behavior of the relationship. For more information, refer to Richard Knudson’s blog on Dynamics CRM 2011 Security Roles.

Be sure to read part 2 of our series to learn about how to create crm workflows for approval notification and automation. Additionally, learn how to customize crm with Script Author which can take you that extra step by automating the process by which you can automatically assign the current user to a look-up field on a form in MS CRM 2011.

Happy coding.

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View this blog article at http://dynamic-crm.com/create-custom-entity/ and find part 2 and 3 in the series here as well!

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