Opportunity product lines

What it does

Product lines are the itemised contents of a deal — what's being sold, how many, at what price and with what discount. They roll up into the opportunity's estimated revenue and they're what gets carried across when the opportunity becomes a quote.

Key facts

Two kinds of line: existing products picked from the catalogue, and write-in products typed ad hoc. Write-ins take a free-text name and a price the seller sets.
Price list drives what's selectable. With a price list on the opportunity, the product lookup filters to the Products in Parent Price List view and picking anything outside it throws an error. Without one, all active products are offered.
You can't set a custom default view on that product lookup — it reverts to the parent price list view.
Recently used products are not filtered by price list, which is how sellers end up selecting something the price list doesn't cover.
On existing-product lines you can edit quantity and manual discount inline; price per unit comes from the price list and is not editable in the grid. On write-in lines, price is editable too.
Price Override is a per-line option available to both existing and write-in products — it replaces the catalogue price with a typed figure.
Line fields that matter: Quantity, Price Per Unit, Manual Discount Amount, Tax, Extended Amount. Tax is manual entry per line; the system just sums it.
The enhanced add products experience (an admin toggle in Product Catalog settings, off by default) replaces the quick-create form with a dialog offering free-text search, inline comparison, multi-select and recently-used products. Product family counts in that dialog only appear under 50,000 products and 5,000 families, and the experience isn't supported on mobile — mobile users fall back to the quick create form.
Bundles added as a line show their contents behind a chevron in the grid. Lines can be reordered with Move Up / Move Down, and there's a Suggestions command for related products.
Products on an opportunity flow automatically onto quotes created from it, and can be pulled onto quotes, orders and invoices later with Get Products.

When to use / skip

Use real product lines when the client needs product-level pipeline, wants quotes generated rather than typed, or has pricing complex enough that a seller shouldn't be doing arithmetic. That's most product businesses and most subscription businesses.

Skip them — genuinely skip them — when the client sells bespoke consulting or projects where every deal is priced from scratch. Forcing a catalogue on that model produces one write-in line per opportunity, which is a lot of configuration to reproduce a text box. In that case use user-provided estimated revenue and move on. If they need line detail purely for the quote document, consider whether Project Operations or a document generation tool is the better fit rather than bending the catalogue.

The awkward middle is a client with a real catalogue but a habit of ad hoc pricing. That's a write-in and price-override conversation, and it's worth having before you design the catalogue rather than after.

Configuration decisions

Whether write-in products are allowed at all. They're the pressure valve for a catalogue that isn't finished, and they're also how catalogue discipline dies.
Whether price override is exposed to sellers, and whether an approval or margin check sits behind it.
Price list mandatory or optional. The Make price lists optional setting in Product Catalog settings lets sellers add products and set prices without a price list; leaving it off keeps pricing controlled but means the catalogue and price lists must be ready on day one.
Classic quick-create versus the enhanced add-products dialog, remembering the mobile fallback and the catalogue size thresholds.
Whether manual discount is captured per line, and whether it's an amount or handled through discount lists — the two behave differently and shouldn't both be in play without a rule.
Whether tax is captured at all in Dynamics or left to the finance system. Manual per-line tax entry is rarely worth it if an ERP is going to recalculate anyway.

Gotchas

Changing the price list on an opportunity that already has lines does not silently fix them. Lines added under the old list keep their prices unless the record recalculates, and overridden prices stay overridden.
The recently-used product list ignoring the price list filter is a real support ticket generator — sellers pick a familiar product, get an error, and blame the system.
Write-in products don't exist as products. They can't be reported on by product, don't roll into product-level pipeline, and won't match anything in the ERP.
Estimated revenue only reflects the lines if the opportunity is set to system-calculated. A seller who switched to user-provided gets lines and a revenue figure that disagree, with no warning.
Tax entered per line is not recalculated when quantity or price changes. It sits there at the old value looking correct.
Currency is fixed by the header. If the header currency is wrong, every line has to go before it can be changed.
Deleting a product from the catalogue or retiring it does not clean up opportunity lines that reference it.

Consultant notes

Demo the enhanced add-products dialog early if the catalogue is large — the search and multi-select is the difference between sellers using product lines and sellers avoiding them.
Ask the client to name who owns the product catalogue before you build it. If the answer is a shrug, plan for write-ins and design the reporting to cope.
Check the price list has an item for every product and unit combination sellers will need. Missing price list items are the most common cause of "the product isn't there" tickets in the first fortnight.
If margin matters, get current cost and standard cost populated on products up front. Percent-margin pricing methods are useless without them.
Before go-live, run a test opportunity through to quote and order and confirm the lines, discounts and tax survive each conversion the way the client expects.

Worth another look if the catalogue grows past the enhanced dialog's family-count thresholds, or if write-ins start outnumbering catalogue lines.