Create Custom Activity Entities in Dynamics 365 for Sales

Posted on: September 5, 2017 | By: Jim Bertler | Microsoft Dynamics CRM

Authored by: John Hinchy

Tracking activities is one of the most important and beneficial aspects of Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Sales. Knowing the interactions your sales people and staff have with your customers is vital information. Within Dynamics, users have the ability to track Phone Calls, Tasks, Emails, and Appointments right out-of-the-box. The ease of logging an activity like a phone call with a prospect, noting what was said, what time the phone call took place, and setting a follow up task makes it almost inexcusable to not keep a record of. Other than the four activities that come with Dynamics, users will often have a need for other types of activities. For example, Logan Consulting recently had a client who needed to track payment activities. Every time a customer made a payment for a service, they wanted to log a new activity to show it had been made.

Because of the ability to customize Dynamics, there were many ways to do this. For example, we could have added a field on the account form for payment amount and payment date, but this leads to the question about multiple payments. By creating a new activity entity for payments, it allows easy logging of each payment in the social pane. It also allows users to visually scroll down the social pane and quickly see payments that have recently been made.

Next, I will demonstrate how to quickly create an activity entity for this. Navigate to Settings- Customizations- Customize the System to open the default solution.

In the default solution, click on Entities, then Click New. Within your new entity, give it a name and description. Then, to activate as an activity, check the box for ‘Define as an activity entity’. This is what will cause it to have the properties as any other activity such as task or phone call will have. From here you can update other settings for the entity, but note that because it is an activity entity some features of normal entities will be greyed out, for example you cannot choose areas that display this entity. Now that your new activity is created, save and publish, and navigate to an account or contact where you want to test your new activity. When you navigate to any record with a social pane now, you will see your new ‘Payment’ activity in the same way you would see any activity, in this case it is listed in the ellipsis of the social pane under Appointment. By default, when you create the activity it has the necessary fields such as Subject, Owner, Due Date, Regarding, and Status. From here you can add additional custom fields such as amount, other dates, or lookups like payment from.

You can see from the image that they have the same Open/Completed properties as other activities, as well as the completed and due date on the social pane display. Lastly, you will see it automatically added to your activities view.

If you think that a Dynamics CRM system is the next best step for your business, contact Logan Consulting, your Microsoft Dynamics CRM partner of Chicago.

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