Most businesses do not have one price. They have a list price, a trade price for the people who buy by the pallet, and a figure somebody agreed with a good customer two years ago that nobody has written down anywhere except in their head.
A price list puts that agreement on the customer’s record, so the right price appears on the document without anybody having to remember the deal or check with whoever struck it.
What you can do
- Build a list per agreement - trade, wholesale, a single large customer, a season.
- Price a whole list by rule: a percentage off, or a fixed amount off, your own sale price.
- Type over any product on the list where the rule is not the agreement.
- Attach a list to a customer, so it applies itself to every document you raise for them.
- Mark something up rather than down, which a negative discount does.
- See every product with the price it will fetch on that list, before a customer does.
- Hand a hand-typed price back to the rule whenever the agreement changes.
How it works in practice
Start with a rule, not a spreadsheet (Products → Price Lists). A price list carries a discount - a percentage or a fixed amount - and every product on it is priced from its own sale price when somebody asks for it. That is the whole of a list for most businesses: one figure, and a catalog that stays in one place.
Fix the exceptions by hand. Open a list’s Prices tab and you will see every product with the price it will fetch. Type over any row and that product is priced by hand from then on: the row stands out and a reset arrow appears beside it, which hands the product back to the rule when the agreement changes.
A typed price always wins. When a document asks what something costs, the answer is the price somebody typed for this product on this list; failing that, the list’s rule applied to the sale price; failing that, the sale price itself. Nothing else gets a vote, which is why a price a customer queries can always be explained.
Attach it to the customer and you are done. Every quote, order and invoice you raise for them picks their price up, and a customer with no list gets the standard price. Nobody has to know which customers have an agreement.
Re-price a whole list at once. Apply rule to the whole list sets the discount for every product on it. It asks first, because it also clears the prices somebody typed by hand.
Mark up as easily as down. A negative discount is a markup - five percent off becomes five percent on. A discount larger than the price stops at zero rather than going negative.
Good to know
- A price list follows the product’s sale price. Change what you charge for something and every list that prices it by rule moves with it. Only the rows somebody set by hand stay where they are, which is usually the point of setting them.
- Applying a rule to a whole list clears the prices you typed. That is what it is for, and it asks first, because clearing prices somebody typed throws that work away.
- A list is not a catalog. It does not decide what a customer may buy, only what it costs them. Publishing a selection of products for a customer, a season or a channel is a catalog, and that lives on the product page.
- One list per customer. A customer carries the list you attach to them, so a business that prices by both trade and volume needs the arithmetic to end up in one list rather than two.
- Prices can be stored with or without tax, per product. A list prices from the product’s own sale price, so whichever convention that product uses is the one the list carries. Decide your default before you build lists on top of a mixed catalog.