Business owners and managers know how critical the right pricing is for their organizations. Just a small improvement in price strategy can significantly improve operating profits. This is the business case for customized pricing, but customizing prices manually by customer, product, service, or transaction can be complex and time consuming.
Businesses that need to control, customize, and automate pricing can do it with ease in QuickBooks® Desktop Enterprise, including the ability to offer and combine quantity discounts, manufacturer markdowns, scheduled promotions, and custom pricing by class, among several other ways. This is all possible using the Advanced Pricing module, included with all QuickBooks Enterprise Platinum and Diamond subscriptions.
Advanced Pricing includes two important functions: Price Rules and Quantity Discounts. This article will focus on Price Rules, while part 2 will dig deeper into Quantity Discounts.
With Price Rules, QuickBooks automatically changes the prices of items on sales forms, according to the rules you create. This is one of the primary benefits of Advanced Pricing – the control of your own customized prices for different types of items and customers, depending on the conditions you set. For years, the Price Levels function has been a popular feature for setting up custom pricing by customer – and it is something available in all earlier QuickBooks Desktop editions. However, Price Rules give you greater flexibility in defining the criteria or conditions, allowing you to be much more precise about when specific prices for items should be charged.
Some use cases where this is useful include:
- Implementing conditions and date ranges for applying manufacturer markdowns, when they occur.
- Planning promotions in advance by scheduling set start and end dates.
- Set custom item pricing by specific salespersons.
Each Price Rule can contain multiple conditions that must be met before QuickBooks automatically changes the prices of items on sales forms, according to the rules you create. In addition, Price Rule conditions can be configured based on Items (specifying by Item, Item Type, or Preferred Vendor), based on Customers (specifying by Customer Name, Customer or Job Type, and Custom Fields), based on Class, and based on Sales Rep.
Besides setting up multiple conditions for custom prices, Price Rules allow you to set price variances for specific date ranges. For example, if you want to offer a promotion on certain items for a certain date range, the Price Rule automatically handles the price variance during those sale dates and returns to normal pricing after the end date. Keep in mind that you can be extremely specific as to which items are included and excluded from such promotion dates.
