Understanding PSA Data: Blog 17: Other Valuable setup

Business Closures
Business closures are important in Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Professional Services and they can have a big influence on resource planning. Setting up business closures will allow you to specify whether certain resources observe business closures, allowing the resource allocator to determine whether a resource is available to work.

Ensure business closures are set up in the correct manner in the settings app under ‘business management’ after PSA go live and before setting working hours up

You can then create new business closures in line with your organisation.

This will support the configuration of work hour templates where you can select whether a resource or team participate in this business closure i.e. UK resources may be assigned to observe UK Bank Holidays whereas the Jordan team may be available to work.

Working Hours

It is a good idea to set up any work hour templates that you may be working with after PSA go live. These are used extensively by the resource planning features and the WBS.

Work hours can be set up per bookable resource by navigating to their record as seen below.

There is then a ‘set up’ option where you can specify a weekly schedule for your resource.

Weekly schedules can be set and work hours can be set, these can be consistent or vary by day. Note: here is where to define whether this user or team will observe the business closures previously set up which is key in their resource availability and resource planning for projects.

Both a user and a team can be assigned a work hour template, with the latter being a much quicker process if there is a consistency throughout working hours in your organisation. This can be done by navigating to the PSA app and settings as seen below, then selecting work hour templates.

Work templates can be created and based off one specific resource’s working hours, or you can create a new template off a resource and name it something more suitable i.e. Standard UK Working Week. This can be done by going to the bookable resources view, highlighting a resource and selecting ‘save calendar as’.

When the work hour template is created, you can then ‘assign’ a specific template to a user or team.