CRM 2013 – Opportunity associated view not showing the opportunities?

A loyal blog follower emailed me with a question about how to create an advanced find to show opportunities for a specific contact.

Question for the Hosk

I thought I’d email you as I have a completely annoying thing I’m trying to sort – but I cannot work out what I’ve got wrong. Also, I’m sure I was resolved this last week by selecting POTENTIAL CUSTOMER Account plus POTENTIAL CUSTOMER Contact . Problem is, I can’t find that option now. It’s driving me mad!

Anyway, what I am trying to do is create a view of all Opportunities linked to a specific contact. So, I navigate to the contact & hit the drop down in the banner – but no Opportunities are displayed:

Contact has no opportunities

At first I thought it was user error but I could quickly recreate the problem with my CRM 2013 online trial

Here are my opportunities

I am going to use the contact Maria Campbell

Here is the opportunity with her on

if you then click on Maria and go to opportunities, you get this screen and it shows no opportunities, even though I just came from an opportunity with the user on!!

I looked at the Opportunity Associated view and it didn’t have any filter criteria, so I couldn’t see how it was filtering the opportunity out

I decided to add an opportunity to see if it would add and that opportunity was visible and that opportunity was displayed???

but I couldn’t see how it was filtering

I checked to make sure the opportunity records were the same and all the key data is the same

So I created an Advanced find using opportunities with contact equals Maria Campbell and both opportunities are returned

If I change this to Potential Customer (Contact) then only one row – the new one I added is returned

here is the fetch XML

customer which shows both

Parentcontact which filters out original opportunity

I looked at all the fields on both opportunites and can see potential customer is different

What is Potential Customer?

Potential customer is a secret field which doesn’t show on the opportunity fields (I couldn’t find it).  I believe it to be a Customer field (e.g. it holds account or contact entities) and it gets automatically set depending on where you create the opportunity from.

To prove this point I would add an opportunity from the Account and then select Maria as the contact

Then I would add a new opportunity from the contact Maria and see what the potential Customer comes out as

As you can see below, when you add from an account the potential customer is the account and it’s the contact when you add from the contact record.

So now we know the secret potential customer field it makes sense what is displayed but it doesn’t make sense it using a field we can’t alter

I wondered what would happen if I did a multiple edit and select the Contact and Account of Maria and Fabrikam Inc.  It turned all the potential customers to Fabrikam.

So I’m back to the position of no opportunities showing for the contact.  I tried just changing the contact but it didn’t budge the potential customer.

Is this a bug

This is tricky because it sort of makes sense but actually it doesn’t because it’s using the potential customer field, which is wrong because it’s filtering out records it should be showing

When you add opportunities directly contact record it will set the potential customer to the contact and then on the Associated opportunity view it will only show these records, even if there are opportunity records with that user as the contact.

For the account Opportunity associated view it will show all the opportunity records, even the opportunities which were added from the contact record and where the potential customer is set to the customer.

How to show the opportunities for the contact

This is now a tricky problem.  One solution is to make sure you go through the process of adding all opportunities via the contact to ensure it will appear on account and contact opportunity associated view.

or

Change the opportunity assocaited view to include the contact record, this would then allow you to view opportunities for the account, you will then have the ability to filter the contact column to only show the contact you want.

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