The Future of Dynamics 365 Project Service Automation
Planner, Project Service Automation, Projects, Finance, and Operations – the Final Vision
The 2019 release wave 2 investments have been focused on providing modular offerings where capabilities across Microsoft Project, Project Service Automation, and Finance and Operations service industries are to complement each other in a seamless fashion when combined and provide a simple go-to-market story that is easily consumable.
The service industries module in Finance and Operations is especially strong in project accounting, with revenue recognition and customer-facing invoicing that leverage date-effective exchange rates and a rich sales tax.
At some point in 2020/21 support for PSA, 3.x clients will get withdrawn and clients will have to transition to Project Online on CDS and Sales Extensions for Project.
For individuals and teams working together on tasks, the Planner will last as the beginning point. The Planner is not a component of the new Project service but the Planner will be added into the new Project service. The Planner Plans will also be present in Project Home, Roadmap, and for reporting across all work.
Work in Progress
In preparation of this vision, changes have been happening across the 3 main applications – Projects, Project Service and Finance and Operations
Users will be able to have access across the 3 applications and based on the Source of Information, be able to work on it, or read information updated from other apps.
Impact on Dynamics 365 Project Service and the Upcoming PSA features
In Q1 2020, MS will replace PSA’s Work Breakdown Structure (WBS), Gantt, and task scheduling capabilities by leveraging these from the new Project service experience.
Once the new integrated experience is available, there is an announcement expected which will define a new way of acquiring the capabilities encapsulated in the current PSA offering.
The PSA subscription will take place by a mixture of Project Online subscriptions and a Dynamics 365 subscription.
Upcoming Dynamics 365 Project Service Automation (PSA) features
Extending the new Project Service and Dynamics Sales Extensions for Project with the Project Financials capabilities in Dynamics 365 Finance will provide a comprehensive offering for project-based organizations.
This initiative will center around combining the existing capabilities in Project Service Automation and Dynamics 365 Finance to complete the business processes for projects.
- Ability to set up split-billing for project contracts
- Ability to set up not-to-exceed limits for project contracts and quotes and enforce them during invoicing
- Ability to set up billing and charge ability options for work breakdown structure (WBS) tasks
- Support for retainers on project contracts
- Point-of-origin-based project operations
Dynamics Sales Extension for Projects
The 2019 release wave 2 will construct on the new project service and will bring the Dynamics 365 Project Service Automation ability with Microsoft Project in a single experience.
This will incorporate abilities such as bookings, sales, pricing, costing, time and expense capture, and approvals and project actuals. These abilities will be packaged as a solution representing Dynamics Sales Extension for Projects.