Following the update to v9, you may encounter an issue where your sales stage is not updating in Dynamics 365. This is a challenge when it comes to reports as all of your views, charts and dashboards will be impacted.
Below, I’ll walk through a few steps to circumvent this issue.
The Problem: Sales Stage not Updating in Dynamics 365?
As you may or may not know, the stage category field used to update based on the sales stage used to update when you clicked the next stage in a business process flow. You could then just add this option set to the views for reporting to see where the opportunity sits in the pipeline. However, with the latest release – every time you create a new BPF, Dynamics 365 takes the information stored in the process stage and stage category fields and creates a custom entity for the BPF and stores the information there.
When you upgrade, Dynamics 365 will create a custom entity based on the name of the BPF.
See below for an example of an entity that gets created for an opportunity BPF:
Because this value is held on the BPF entity and not the actual opportunity and it is the 1 in the 1:N relationship, you can’t actually pull this value into opportunity views.
Solution: Create a Workflow
What you need to do is create a workflow on this new entity and trigger on create and change of Active stage field to update a sales stage field on the opportunity.
Step 1. In Dynamics 365, go into Settings > Processes > Create New.
Process name: “Opportunity Sales Process”, the category is workflow. The entity is the name of the process flow i.e. “Opportunity Sales Process.”
Click OK.
Step 2. Next, in the options for automatic processes, select start when: “Process is applied” and “Process changes.”
Step 3. When it’s triggered, this means you’ll be updating the opportunity pipeline stage as per the screenshot below:
Step 4. Hit save and activate and you’re good to go.
This workflow will need to be applied for all Business Process Flows in the latest release. So when building out BPFs, please ensure that you are taking into account that you must create a new stage field and update it via a workflow. You will also need to update all the views, charts, and dashboards that require it.
