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To work with the Field Service and Project Operations integration, it's helpful to understand the concepts and relationships of projects.
The project contract defines the customer-facing commercial agreement, while project contract lines divide that agreement into billable components and define how work is financially interpreted.
A project represents the delivery structure, and project tasks form the work breakdown structure (WBS) used to plan, schedule, estimate, and track the work.
Project management in Field Service
While Project Operations provides the full project management capabilities, Field Service provides minimal project-related forms that frontline and operational users can use to set up the basic project structure required for work orders to transact against a project. These lightweight capabilities aren't intended to replace full project planning or execution tools in Project Operations. Instead, they ensure that Field Service teams can continue their workflow without switching applications to create foundational project records.
By using these forms, Field Service users can create the essential project artifacts, project contracts, contract lines, and projects that establish the financial framework needed for material usage, labor (services), and actuals to flow into Project Operations or Finance. When the required project structure exists, you can link work orders or agreements so that all operational activity routes to the correct financial records.
Use Project Operations for project task management as it requires a Project Operations license. Project management scheduling or resource planning isn't required (or available) in Field Service so use Project Operations for those capabilities.
Project requirements
To link a work order or agreement to a project, you need an eligible project. Field Service forms enable you to create the minimal but required project structure. These requirements ensure financial consistency and allow Field Service transactions - such as material usage and labor services - to flow properly into Project Operations or Finance.
An eligible project must meet the following criteria:
- The project is associated with a project contract where the order type is Work-based.
- The project contract has a project-based contract line with a defined Billing method (time and materials or fixed price).
- The work order billing account matches a customer defined on the associated project contract customer line.
- All customers associated with the Project Contract Line Customer belong to the same legal entity.
- The project contract line is configured to support the transaction types you're recording on the work order, including materials and/or labor time.
- The project's actual finish date is blank or set in the future.
Note
The Project lookup field on the work order in Field Service displays projects associated with project-based contract lines that contain the work order billing account on a related project contract customer line.
Project contract lines
Project contract lines define the commercial and billing structure for project work. Field Service work orders provide the execution context. You can map specific tasks in a project to a contract line. You can also manage multiple customers on a project contract line.
When a Field Service transaction flows to Project Operations, the system uses the project, project task, transaction class, and contract line setup to determine how to process the transaction.
Project contract line fields that affect Field Service transactions
The following fields appear on the project contract line form.
| Field | Why it matters |
|---|---|
| Billing Method | Determines whether transactions create cost only or both cost and unbilled sales actuals. - Use Time and Material so that approved transactions create cost actuals and unbilled sales actuals. - Use Fixed Price so that approved transactions create cost actuals only. Billing is handled through milestones or progress-based billing. |
| Project | Identifies the project that the contract line applies to. |
| Included Tasks | Determines whether the contract line applies to all project tasks or only selected tasks. - Use All Project Tasks when the same contract line applies across the project. - Use Selected Project Tasks Only when specific tasks need their own billing treatment, contract line, biller, funding source, or commercial arrangement. This option is the recommended pattern for task-based billing. |
| Include Time | Determines whether labor transactions can resolve to the contract line. |
| Include material | Determines whether material transactions can resolve to the contract line. |
| Include Expense | Determines whether expenses can resolve to the contract line, if expenses are enabled. |
| Contract Line Customer | Supports billing to the appropriate customer or biller, where applicable. |
| Not-to-exceed Limit | Applies a contractual cap for Time and Material contract lines. |
Project Operations and finance and operations
In the Integrated Project Operations with Finance deployment model, Project Operations uses dual-write integration to synchronize setup and configuration data between Microsoft Dataverse and Dynamics 365 finance and operations. Learn more in Project Operations setup and configuration data integration.