This is the first of a 10-part blog series designed to provide a Dynamics 365 CRM System Administrator with a great toolkit to become a super system admin! The first blog is about managing business settings.

The Tools

Let’s not make you wait any longer. Here are the 10 tools I want to discuss with you over the next several weeks:

You’re probably using some of these tips, but hopefully you can learn something new!

Tool #1. Managing Business Settings

There’s so much you can manage in the Settings area of Dynamics 365! To access your organization’s settings, you can use the web client experience – but this is being deprecated in the future.

Use the Power Platform Admin Center to leverage the latest experience and manage your security settings. For now, some things still must be managed in the web client but will eventually move to the Power Platform Admin Center.

For anyone using the web client, you’ll need to navigate to the Advanced Settings area from the front-end of your system (highlighted below):

There is a ton of cool stuff you can do in this area, but we’re going to dive into three of them:

Business Management
Administration
Data Management

Business Management

In this area, there is a lot you can set up and configure. Some great areas are:

Queues: Here, you can create and manage any queues to route records, as well as set up criteria for automatic record creation and updates.
Goal Metrics: Configure goal metrics to utilize in your goal tracking.
Currencies: If you use multiple currencies, you can set these up and manage them manually here. (Hint: Power Automate is an excellent way to automate currency values!)
Fiscal Year Settings: Helpful to make sure dashboarding and goals report on accurate fiscal periods.
Rollup Queries: Lists your rollup queries that you can use to get data about groups of related records.

Administration

The Administration area of the Settings menu lets you work with:

System Settings: An important area where you can set values for numbers, calendar, currency, customizations, email tracking and more at the system level.
Auto Numbering: Set up the prefix numbers for Contracts, Cases, Quotes, Orders, Articles, Invoices & Campaigns. Set the suffix length for Contracts, Cases, Quotes, Orders & Invoices.
Languages: Manage multi-languages in your system.
Virtual Entity Data Sources: Manage any virtual entities in the system.

Data Management

Data area of Dynamics 365 for system administrators - business settings

Use the Data Management area of Dynamics 365’s Settings to set up, manage and configure:

Duplicate Detection Rules: Manage rules to help prevent duplicates in your database. You should absolutely review the out-of-the-box ones and deactivate any that don’t make sense for your business. Add ones that do make sense for your business!
Duplicate Detection Settings: Set up organization-wide settings for duplicate detection.
Duplicate Detection Jobs: Create and monitor duplicate detection jobs.
Data Maps: Any maps you have created for file imports can be managed in this area. You can also create new data maps if desired (though I’ve found it easiest to create them through the data import wizard).
Imports: Create and monitor data import jobs.
Bulk Record Deletion: Set up bulk record deletion jobs (careful when using these! There is no undo!)

Stay tuned for the remainder of this blog series! Coming soon….

And stay tuned to my YouTube channel, where we will post video coverage on these topics.

Tagged administration, business management, business settings, data management, duplicate, dynamics 365, system administrator

Tools to Help You Be A Super System Admin: Managing Business Settings in Dynamics 365

The Tools