We have a few clients in North Carolina that would like to see sales order information in but don’t want to integrate their sales order information into CRM. Plus, let’s face it, out of the box CRM sales order functionality does not hold a candle to Dynamics GP or Dynamics SL. After all, they are accounting packages, they keep track of financial information and CRM is a customer relationship management software package, it keeps track of customers. Well here is the way to have your customers and your numbers too. Iframes.
What is an iframe you say? It is a way to pull data external to CRM into CRM. In this case, a sql reporting services report that has sales data specific to each customer.
Basically, a sales report is created that has a unique identifier for the accounting customer linked to a unique identifier for the same customer in CRM. For example, our clients use the customer number from the accounting system and have that displayed as the account number in CRM. Then a few standard CRM parameters are placed into the report. An iframe is created on one of the account tabs in CRM and the web address for the report is added to the iframe. Click publish and there you go! Now when you open an account in CRM you can have a report that displays the sales data for that account.
One of our Greensboro clients utilizing this way of displaying data has the report show automatically when the correct tab is accessed. Another client in Charlotte only has the data displayed once a few parameters have been selected.
Either way works, and not just for accounts. If you want to display data from your accounting system all you have to have is a way to link the data in one to the other.
If you would like to know more about how this is done let us know.
by Paige Cassada, Intelligent Technologies, Inc. a
