Kits have been available in the product catalog from the earliest days of Dynamics CRM and they can still be used. But they have been replaced by Bundles. This article compares the two.
For both Kits and Bundles, the idea is to sell a group of products together, perhaps with better pricing for the customer than buying the individual products separately.
Although Kits can still be used, the Microsoft documentation states that Kits are deprecated (which means they will be removed in a later version – as yet unspecificied and that Bundles should be used instead).
Bundles appeared with the product catalog changes that introduced families and product properties in Dynamics CRM 2015.
Product Association Entity
Both Kits and Bundles use the Product Association entity to link products to a Kit or Bundle. You can search for Product Association using Advanced Find.
On the Product Association entity, the Product field links to the Kit or Bundle and the Associated Product field links to the product that is part of the Kit or Bundle.
But, in a Product Association form the labels are shown as Kit or Bundle for the Product field and as Product for the Associated Product field.
Making Changes
There are differences as to whether a product association (an item that is part of a kit or bundle) can be added, modified or removed. This is summarized in the table below.
| Record Status | Kit Edit | Bundle Edit | Kit Add | Bundle Add | Kit Remove | Bundle Remove |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Draft | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Active | No | No | Yes | No | Yes | Yes |
| Under Revision | No | No | Yes | No | Yes | Yes |
Other Differences
| Kit | Bundle |
|---|---|
| Can’t be cloned | Can be cloned. When a bundle is cloned, a copy is made of the product, fields, properties and all the items in the bundle. |
| User can’t see Kit products on a sales record, only the Kit name | User can see Bundle products on a sales record |
| Items in a Kit are required – a user can’t choose to remove an item | Items in a bundle can be required or optional, optional items can be removed from the sales record |
| Kits can be part of a parent Kit | Bundles can’t be added to a parent bundle |
| Kit price is set by the Kit Product (not the individual items) | Bundle price is set by the Bundle Product (not by any of the required items) plus the price of any optional items |
Using Kits and Bundles on Sales Record
When a Kit is added to a sales record, it behaves like a regular product record in that the name and price are shown but the items linked to the kit aren’t shown.
But for Bundles, the items that are part of the Bundle are shown and any items that are marked as optional can be edited or removed.
Limitations
A limitation that I have encountered is that after a product is added to a bundle it can’t be changed (for example, to modify the quantity) though the product can be removed.
Even more strangely, I think, is that after a Bundle is published (taking it from Draft status to Active status), you can’t add products to the Bundle anymore. Even if the Bundle is revised, you still can’t add products. And it isn’t possible to go from Active to Draft. There is no command for this and I tested changing the status from Active to Draft in a workflow and it failed.
So if you want to use groups of products, you have the choice of Kits or Bundles – but be aware of the limitations and also do consider your finance or ERP software and how you integrate the product catalog with Dynamics 365.