Microsoft CRM 4.0 Fiscal Year Settings

In a recent project I needed to understand how the different Fiscal Year settings impact the setup of CRM, but I couldn't find all that much information on the topic. Here's the information I uncovered and found through just testing various settings and checking how they impacted the Sales Quota configuration.

Some Background on CRM 4.0 Fiscal Year Settings

Microsoft Dynamics CRM’s Fiscal Year Settings are probably some of the lesser known or understood settings within CRM, in fact many organizations may never actually set the Fiscal Year Settings in their implementation.– One reason for their obscurity is that there isn’t much opportunity to experiment with the settings since once they are set in an organization, they cannot be changed through any supported method. If you set them incorrectly, you’ll need to call support.

The most obvious need for implementing the fiscal year settings in CRM is that you cannot access the CRM Sales Quotas unless the organization’s fiscal year settings are set. The Quotas use the fiscal settings to determine the length of each sales period. – For example an organization set to Quarterly fiscal periods will be able to set up 4 sales quotas per salesperson per year. Annual fiscal periods will allow only 1 quota per salesperson per year.  (BTW, Joel Lindstrom from Customer Effective recently shared some SQL allowing you to group sales by quarters without being dependent on the fiscal year settings.)

Here is some fundamental information that proved useful to me and would be useful to anyone wanting to research the Fiscal Year Settings before pulling the trigger on their organization’s settings.

Setting the Fiscal Year in CRM.

The settings define how CRM should associate sales activities to an organizations’ financial periods.

To access and set the Fiscal Year settings in CRM, go to “Settings”, Choose “Business Management”, then select “Fiscal Year Settings”.  - You’ll see a dialog similar to this.

Note – once the settings are committed for a particular CRM organization, they are not modifiable (through any ordinary means). -In that case, you’ll see the dialog box, but all fields will be ‘greyed-out’ since they are now read-only for that organization.

Fiscal Year Settings and their purpose

Start Date -

Some organizations start their fiscal year based on the calendar year, Jan1-Dec31 – while others, like Microsoft, start their fiscal year July 1 and it runs through June 30 each year. – Whatever the organization uses as the start of their calendar year, this is the place to set the start date – the end date will always be 1 year from that date.

Template

Some organizations operate on a monthly cycle, some on a quarterly cycle and some on a semi-annual or annual period – while other organizations divide the year into 13 4-week periods. Setting the Template sets up the periods in which quotas can be set. (once set, there’s no going back through normal supported changes.)

There is an checkbox option to determine whether monthly periods should use the month name as the period name. if checked, the first period of a fiscal year that starts 1/1/2009 would be “January” if left unchecked, the same period would be labeled M1 or P1.

Fiscal Year (Display Code)

This determines the way CRM will display the fiscal Year. – YYYY = “2008”, YY = “08”, FY YYYY = “FY 2008” etc. - (The “ggyy FY” and “ggyy Fiscal Year” settings include the period / era stamp used in some languages/locales - notably Japanese and Taiwanese).

Name Based On

Choices are StartDate or EndDate. – this determines whether the Fiscal Year is named based on the start or end of the fiscal calendar. – If the Fiscal Year starts Jan 1 and ends Dec 31, the name would be the same regardless of the setting. – However, in any other fiscal calendar, the start date and end date are in 2 different years. – Using the example of Microsoft, their corporate calendar name is based on “End Date” since the current Microsoft Fiscal Year (July 1, 2008 – June 30, 2009) is named FY 2009. (The Microsoft fiscal year’s name is based on the end-date.)

Fiscal Period (Display Code)

These define the format / naming convention CRM will use to describe the individual fiscal periods. The choice here should align with the Template used previously – otherwise you could wind up with 12 “Quarters” per year – which might lead to an awkward or uncomfortable conversation with your project sponsor.

Display As

This determines the display order of the Period and Year – and the character used to connect the two, if any. – The examples used in the picklist are not updated according to the settings for Fiscal Year or Period so they won’t exactly show you what your settings will look like in the end. – The choice here is really do you want the year first or the period first, and then do you want a Space, No Space, a Hyphen or a Slash to be used to separate the Fiscal Year from the Period.

Committing the Fiscal Year Settings.

Once you are absolutely sure you have the correct settings identified and set in CRM, click ‘ok’. – You’ll be given your last chance to confirm that you want to move forward and commit this change.

Once you click “OK” you’re done. The changes are committed to the database and are no longer editable through the UI or any supported method.

-- Scott Sewell

Comments

[MD]

Scott, I'm currently trying to improve a custom SQL Function to allow grouping by fiscal periods in sales reports (amoung others). Right now, my quarters are hard coded for a typical 1/1/YY start date and broken up into quarters. I want to design this so it can be applied to any organization, as defined by their fiscal settings in the FilteredOrganization view. However, as I look over my clients, they all seem to have similar Fiscal Periods. What I'm wondering is if there is a resource that can get me the available string values for the following Fiscal Settings:
FiscalPeriodType,
FiscalYearFormat,
FiscalPeriodFormat,
FiscalYearPeriodConnect,
FiscalYearDisplayCode.
Any thoughts would be appreciated...