Using Sales Agreements in AX in an Unorthodox Manner (Hint - To Track Employee Sales)

While preparing for an installment of the AX for Dummies series regarding Sales and Purchasing Agreements in AX, I came up with what I thought was a pretty good idea that may seem a bit unorthodox but can solve a simple company problem! Stop me if you've heard this before.

Typically when you think of sales agreements, you think of a contract set up between a customer and a supplier. You are offering a good or service at a certain price if they commit to buy a certain quantity or dollar amount before the agreement expires. These are easily set up in AX and can provide great value in tracking the status of a contract with a customer/vendor.

Now, consider the issue of tracking employee sales within your company. This is something that can get out of hand if not managed properly. What if we could use Sales agreements in AX to track and manage these?

For example, company X allows their employees to buy their product at cost. But company X only wants to sell 500 pieces of this product as employee sales per year. Set up a sales agreement! Every time an employee purchases this product at cost, create a release order against the sales agreement and see the total on the agreement decrement until it reaches zero and the agreement has been fulfilled. With a little bit of knowledge, you can easily make this idea a reality in your company.

Creating a Sales agreement in AX

So, how do I set up a sales agreement in AX? Great question. Follow through my tutorial below on setting up a Sales agreement in AX.

Sales agreements can be found in the Sales and marketing module under Common > Sales orders > Sales agreements.

Once there, click on New Sales agreement (on the far left):

In the ribbon on your Sales agreement list page, select New Sales agreement to begin creating your agreement.

This will open a new Sales agreement form in AX. For my example, I created a generic customer account called Employee Sales, customer ID 1234. I enter this as the Customer account when starting my agreement.

As I begin setup of my agreement, I have several considerations to make. When should my agreement expire? Do I want this to be a Product quantity commitment? A Value commitment? A Product value commitment? What is the cut off on the agreement?

Let's work with my example above. I want to set up an agreement where employees can purchase our product at cost, but the company only wants to sell at most, 500 pieces a year. This would be a product quantity agreement, where the quantity that gets decremented is 500. We can put the employee cost for this product on the line for this agreement and feel good about knowing that sales orders created from this will be accurate because agreement pricing always overrides trade agreements and prices listed on items. Next, I am creating this agreement for the year 2016. I set the effective date to 1/1/2016 and the expiration date to 12/31/2016.

Your Sales agreement will look something like this as you begin populating the fields.

Now that we have our agreement header in place, let's switch to line view and add our product.

Every Sales agreement in AX has a Header view and a Line view. This is very common in many forms throughout AX!

As you can see, I have added a line for 500 pieces at the employee cost of $15. This equates to $7500 on the agreement.

Next, we have to set the agreement from "On hold" to "Effective" on the header.

From there, we can create release orders against this agreement that will decrement the total.

Let's say we sold three of our item today. Since my sales agreement is now effective and has a valid quantity on it, we are now able to create a Release order (second from left).

Release order is now available for selection.

Select Release order to open a new Release order against the agreement.

The Release order, while basically a sales order at heart, looks a bit different in its form. I have made this order for a quantity of three (I added a site and warehouse as well, but wanted to keep that clean for the purpose of this blog post).

Once I finish, I receive a confirmation that a sales order has been created.

You will receive an infolog with your new Sales order number that was created against the agreement.

If I check my Sales orders in AX, I will see this order listed with the price that I specified on the agreement. I can then invoice against this once I receive payment from my employee.

That's not the best part though! When I return to my sales agreement, on the Line details for the line, I see that 3 have been decremented and the new agreement quantity is 497.

The remaining quantity is showed under fulfillment in the Line details. You can track multiple items on on an agreement this way!

I can't think of a better way to track employee sales in AX. What tricks have you discovered in AX that seem unorthodox but have helped your company in a surprising manner? I would love to know.