Make smarter, faster, and more confident quote decisions—right where you work. 

Project quoting has always required a careful balance—aligning profitability with competitiveness, staffing strategies with delivery costs, and customer expectations with business outcomes. 

But evaluating these trade-offs hasn’t always been easy. It often means jumping between tools, manually recalculating numbers, and relying on assumptions to guide critical decisions. 

That’s where What-if Analysis (Preview) in Dynamics 365 Project Operations comes in. 

This new capability brings real-time simulation directly into your quoting workflow—so you can explore options, compare outcomes, and make decisions with clarity before finalizing a quote. 

What Is What-if Analysis? 

What-if Analysis introduces a dedicated simulation workspace within a project quote, allowing you to model changes to quantities and pricing and instantly see their financial impact. 

Instead of working through “what if” scenarios offline, you can now: 

• Explore multiple approaches within the quote 

• Compare their outcomes side by side 

• Apply the most effective scenario when you’re ready 

All without modifying the actual quote until you choose to. 

It’s a more intuitive, controlled way to move from estimation to decision-making. 

Turn Everyday Questions into Clear Answers 

Every project quote involves key decisions: 

• Should work shift to a lower-cost delivery center? 

• What happens if billing rates increase for specific roles? 

• Can you stay competitive while protecting margin? 

With What-if Analysis, these are no longer hypothetical questions. 

As you adjust quantities and pricing, the system instantly recalculates key financial metrics—including revenue, cost, gross margin, and budget variance—so you can clearly see the impact of every change. 

This real-time feedback helps you move quickly from exploration to confident, data-backed decisions. 

How It Works 

Getting started is simple. From the What-if Analysis tab on a Draft quote, you can create a scenario based on the quote’s existing data. Each scenario is isolated, allowing you to experiment freely without affecting the live quote. 

Within the simulation workspace, you can adjust quantities and pricing across dimensions such as resourcing unit, role, or any custom pricing dimension configured in your environment. Whether you’re making high-level adjustments or refining details at the quote line level, the experience is designed to be flexible and intuitive. 

You can create multiple scenarios—each representing a different approach—and compare them side by side. Built-in comparison views highlight differences in financial outcomes, making trade-offs easier to evaluate. 

When you’ve identified the best approach, applying the scenario updates the Draft quote in place—so you can move forward with confidence, without creating a new revision. 

What This Means for You 

What-if Analysis transforms how you approach project quoting—bringing clarity, speed, and confidence into every decision. 

• Make decisions with confidence: Instantly understand how pricing and staffing changes impact revenue, cost, and margin—before committing to a quote 

• Optimize for both competitiveness and profitability: Evaluate trade-offs in real time and choose the approach that best aligns with your goals 

• Reduce reliance on spreadsheets and manual iteration: Keep simulation and decision-making within Project Operations 

• Drive faster, more aligned conversations: Use data-backed scenarios to align stakeholders and move decisions forward 

Instead of relying on assumptions, your team can now explore possibilities, evaluate outcomes, and finalize quotes with confidence—knowing the numbers support the decision. 

Availability and Prerequisites 

What-if Analysis is currently available as a preview feature in: 

• Project Operations Core (Lite deployment) 

• Project Operations integrated with ERP 

To get started, enable the What-if Analysis feature flag in your environment. The What-if Analysis tab will then be available on qualifying Draft quotes. 

A few things to keep in mind: 

• Scenarios can only be created on quotes in Draft status that contain estimates 

• Activated or closed quotes are not eligible 

• If the underlying quote changes, scenarios will need to be recreated 

As with all preview features, we recommend evaluating this capability in a non-production environment. 

The Bottom Line 

Every project quote is a critical business decision. What-if Analysis gives you the tools to approach that decision with clarity—replacing guesswork with real-time insight and manual effort with seamless simulation. 

The result is not just better quotes, but better decisions—ones that are competitive, financially sound, and aligned with your business goals. 

Get Started 

Enable What-if Analysis in your environment today and start turning “what if?” into “we know.” 

Learn More 

We are making constant enhancements to our features. To learn more about What-Analysis in Project Quotations, visit Quote What-if Analysis 

The post Take the Guesswork Out of Project Quoting with What-if Analysis in Dynamics 365 Project Operations  appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Project quotations in Dynamics 365 Project Operations help you create and manage detailed estimates for your customers before a project begins. A project quotation includes the estimated scope of work, roles, effort, timelines, pricing, and terms, providing a clear understanding of the proposed services and associated costs. 

Within the Quote, quote lines represent the high-level components of work being delivered, while the quote line details capture granular estimates, tying in scheduling, cost, and revenue details. Each quote line is also linked to contracting models and chargeable components, allowing for accurate modeling of revenue spread, project spending, and profitability, both at the quote level and also for each individual component.  

We designed the recent update around three key goals: 

• Elevating the overall user experience 

• Leveraging new platform capabilities 

• Simplifying user interactions when creating and managing quotes 

A Closer Look: Quote Form Improvements in Dynamics 365 Project Operations

A significant change is the reduction of tabs within the Quote form, centralizing your quote management experience. Let’s explore the enhanced tabs: 

Summary Tab: One View for All Critical Financial Insights 

All related tabs for quotes are now consolidated under the Summary tab. This tab gives you a comprehensive view of your quote’s financial health, including: 

• Customer budget 

• Profitability 

• Scheduled delivery date 

• Detailed cost and revenue breakdowns over time 

With this unified view, you can confidently track and manage quote details to ensure alignment with your project’s financial goals and customer commitments. 

Project Lines Tab: Detailed Control Over Quote Lines and Estimates 

The Project Lines tab has seen a substantial transformation and deserves special attention. As a result, this powerful workspace enables you to manage both project quote lines and their detailed estimates within a single, easy-to-use grid view. Here’s everything you can do: 

• Consolidated View with Nested Grids: View project quote lines at a glance and expand each line to see its associated quote line details in a nested, expandable grid format. 

• Comprehensive Details for Every Quote Line: For each quote line, you can view critical information such as billing method, invoice schedule, associated project, and budget performance metrics (transaction classes, discounts, fees, margin percentage, and extended amount). 

• Drill-Down into Quote Line Details: Expanding a quote line reveals all underlying quote line details, allowing you to closely monitor and manage granular estimates tied to the high-level component. 

• Direct Actions from the Grid: 
  • Create new quote lines or delete existing ones without navigating away. 
  • Import project estimates to automatically generate quote line details. 
  • Manually create quote line details for custom estimates right within the tab. 

• Full Editing Capabilities: Select any quote line detail to edit or delete it as needed. For deeper financial insights, use the Open cost detail action to view the specific cost breakdown of each line. 

• Apply Price Overrides with Ease: Need to adjust pricing for time transaction line details? Simply: 
  • Select the desired line detail. 
  • Use the Price override button to make the price change, click save, and accept recalculate. 
  • Apply price overrides within both the Quote and Quote Line forms, ensuring flexibility and control. 

• Access Quote Line Details for Sales and Cost Prices: 
  • The Quote Line Detail tab now provides two form views–Line details and Line details: Cost , though which you can analyze both sales and cost prices over time. 
    • Line details: This view displays each quote line detail along with its associated sales price, with time-phased sales prices broken down by specific periods. The Open cost detail button is still available on selecting the quote line detail and shows the related cost rate and amount for the selected quote line detail in an expanded view. 
    • Line details: Cost: This view gives you insight into the cost price associated with each quote line detail. The subgrid displays time-phased cost prices, helping you to easily assess the cost structure of each quote line. 

These enhancements provide greater visibility into both sales and cost prices, enabling more accurate pricing assessments for each quote line. 

This comprehensive functionality empowers your sales and delivery teams to build accurate, competitive quotes faster while maintaining visibility into the financial levers of every project component. 

Time Phasing of Project Estimates 

Complementing the quoting enhancements, we are also introducing Time Phasing of Project Estimates. This critical feature allows you to spread estimated costs and revenue over time, reflecting project duration and delivery milestones. 

The Time phasing of prices feature provides visibility into price fluctuations over time within Project quote lines. Now, nested quote line details display price changes phased out on a weekly basis. This allows you to track adjustments due to price overrides or multiple price lists.

Throughout the duration of a quote line detail, the system distributes the quantities and prices for each week, making it easier to identify pricing adjustments. The parent quote line detail reflects the weighted average price of all child time-phased lines. You can create role price overrides on a quote line detail that is then reflected in the nested time-phased lines. Each week in the nested Quote Line detail line retains the price applicable on the first day of that week. 

What Does This Mean for You? 

With these enhancements, Dynamics 365 Project Operations offers: 

• Simplified workflows for faster quote creation 

• Full visibility into financial details at every stage 

• Better forecasting with time-phased estimates, enabling accurate tracking of sales and cost price fluctuations and role price adjustments over time 

• Increased efficiency with fewer clicks and a modern UI 

• Smarter decision-making with real-time KPIs 

These improvements to project quotes in Dynamics 365 are designed to help you win more deals, deliver more predictable project outcomes, and maximize profitability. 

Call to Action

We encourage you to explore them and see firsthand how they can transform your project sales and estimation process. Experience the streamlined quoting process in Dynamics 365 Project Operations and unlock better control over your project estimates. Start building detailed, accurate, and customer-ready quotes with ease. Dive into the enhanced Quote form, explore time-phased estimates, and empower your teams to make informed, confident decisions. Ready to elevate your quoting experience? Explore the new capabilities today! 

Learn More

We are making constant enhancements to our features. To learn more about Project quotations, visit Project quotations new experience and to learn more about Time phasing of estimates, visit Estimate a project quote line 

The post Reimagine Project Quotes with Enhanced Experience and Time Phased Estimates in Dynamics 365 Project Operations  appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

In today’s fast-paced business landscape, efficient project planning and insightful execution are essential for success. However, the manual processes involved in project management can often lead to inefficiencies, delays, and increased risks. That’s where Copilot for project comes in, revolutionizing the way organizations approach project management. 

With the latest update, this trailblazing feature is Generally Available to all Dynamics 365 Project Operations enabled geographies and languages, ensuring that organizations worldwide can leverage its transformative capabilities. Whether you’re a project manager in a professional services organization or leading projects across various industries, Copilot for project is designed to meet your needs. 

Copilot for project empowers users to enhance project management efficiency by generating work breakdown structures, assessing risk registers with suggested mitigations, producing comprehensive project status reports, and enabling natural language commands through the sidecar chat feature. 

Copilot for project capabilities

Insightful Project Status Reporting

One of the most time-consuming tasks for project managers is the production of project status reports. Gathering data from multiple sources, summarizing project health dimensions, and highlighting risks are all essential but repetitive tasks that can consume valuable time and resources.

Copilot for project changes the game by automating key components of the project status report, allowing project managers to focus on crafting narrative text and refining project-specific insights. Using Copilot for project, the project manager can produce project status reports that integrate concise summaries of scheduling and financial data, as well as generate insightful content that highlights the overall project progress, financial performance, and schedule performance. There are two types of reports to address the reporting needs of both internal and external stakeholders: an internal report that provides a work summary by resource, along with financial data including estimates and actuals, and an external report that excludes the financial data. All reports are saved and can be recalled with all prior edits maintained. 

Efficient Task Planning

Streamline project planning with auto-generated work breakdown structures, saving time and effort in creating project delivery plans. Enter the project name and description, and Copilot will provide the suggested task plan for your project. You can tailor further this task plan to suit your project’s needs. 

Risk Assessment and Mitigation Planning

Given the disposition of the project’s scope, schedule, and budget, Copilot assesses risk registers, provides mitigation suggestions, and gauges probabilities for each identified risk. 

Call to Action

With Copilot for project, project managers can now achieve significant time savings, especially when juggling multiple projects simultaneously. By eliminating mundane tasks like manual data aggregation, maintaining multiple data pivots for collecting insights, and summarization, project managers can allocate their energy towards strategic decision-making and driving project success. 

Overall, Copilot for project represents a significant leap forward in project management efficiency and effectiveness. With its advanced AI capabilities, organizations can optimize project delivery times, reduce costs, increase customer satisfaction, and ultimately drive growth and profitability. Embrace the future of project management with Copilot for project and unlock a world of possibilities for your organization. 

Learn More 

We are making constant enhancements to our features. To learn more about Project for copilot feature, visit  Copilot for project. 

The post Ready to elevate your project management game? Unlock Efficiency and Insight using Copilot for project in Dynamics 365 Project Operations  appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.