More Weirdness with the Sales Pipeline Report

So here's a new one. It's been known amongst us CRM geeks for some time that the built-in Sales Pipeline report has some, let's say, quirks. For example, if you want to group the report by your Sales Process using the parameter drop-down, you'll first have to have a Workflow applied against the Opportunities, and the workflow must contain "Stages" which have the names of each step of your sales process. This is where the Pipeline Report gets its groupings.

If you run a workflow against the Opportunities, and update the Opportunity salesstagecode or stepname fields, this out-of-the-box report will not show you your pipeline with these groupings.

Well, today I discovered something even stranger. I was testing a sales process for a client, and set it to be a manual workflow so I could run it on demand during testing. I ended up running it three times agains 50 opportunities. Guess what? The Sales Pipeline report showed that there were 150 opportunities in my pipeline! Each opportunity was counted once every time a workflow with stages had been run against it.

So I realized that since it's pulling its groupings from the completed workflows, I could just delete the workflows from the histories, and that would take care of it right? Well, only sorta. I also had to use the scale group job editor to kick off the deletion service, since the report doesn't filter out completed workflows that have been marked for deletion.

One of these days I'm just going to have to rebuild that Sales Pipeline report from scratch!

UPDATE: A support engineer at Microsoft informed me that a hotfix should be released soon that fixes this behavior in the Sales Pipeline report. Thanks, John!

You say you're in Dublin and want to learn more about Dynamics CRM?

Well, isn't that a coincidence! I'll be speaking at epicenter 2010 next week, Ireland's largest software show and developer conference.

More about my session is at this link. Oh, and my good friend and fellow CRM MVP, Ronald Lemmen will be speaking as well.
It's not too late to get tickets!