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Additional Info - Pricing Level Methods

You have multiple methods and ways to identify prices your customers pay for items in e-automate. You can choose not to identify any pricing information and e-automate automatically doubles your system cost when adding items to service or sales transactions. If you want to specify a specific price for an inventory item for all customers you use the Default price field. When the Default price field is populated, e-automate assumes all customers pay the price identified in the Default price field. If you want more customized methods for pricing you can use Price Levels or Customer Pricing. For additional information on Customer Pricing, see Setting up Customer Pricing in the Inventory section of Online Help. This section contains additional information on how Price Levels work and are identified in e-automate. If you decide to use multiple methods for pricing your inventory items, see Using Multiple Price Methods for additional information.

Price Levels give you the ability to identify groups of prices for an inventory item. You can create as many groups as necessary for your pricing needs, although too many groups make management cumbersome. Price levels can have a method, amount (price or percent), and a quantity. Quantities allow for different prices when the customers buy more than one of an item on a single transaction. Method allows you to choose from one of the following methods.

Absolute (A): Defines exactly the price charged for the item.

Margin – Average Cost (MG): Price determined by a Margin formula: Price = Cost/(1-Margin), where Cost = LIFO, FIFO, or system average cost for the item.

Margin – Standard Cost (MGS): Price determined by a Margin formula: Price = Standard cost/(1-Margin), where Standard cost = the value identified in the inventory item’s Standard cost field.

Markup Average Cost (MK): Price determined by a Markup formula: Price = Cost * (1 + Markup %), where Cost = LIFO, FIFO, or system average cost for the item.

Markup – Standard Cost (MKS): Price determined by a Markup formula: Standard Cost * (1 + Markup %), where Standard cost = the value identified in the inventory item’s Standard cost field.

Percent of Default (PD): Defines price based on the existing default price level.

You create and configure Price Levels so you can assign them to customers. Customers with different levels can pay different prices for inventory items as you set them on inventory items. You configure the price level on each inventory item or import them using the Inventory Item Utility Spreadsheet.

One Price Level in e-automate can be configured to be the Default Price Level. This allows you to set the Default Price Level pricing configuration on all inventory items and then only configure other price levels on inventory items in which you want to be charged different than the Default Price Level configured price. If e-automate cannot find the price level assigned to the customer on an inventory item it then looks for the Default Price Level and uses the price configured by the Default Price Level.

For example, you create a price level named Retail and configured it to be the Default Price Level. You also create three additional price levels, Platinum, Gold, and Silver. You can assign the price levels Retail, Platinum, Gold, and Silver to your customers. When setting up inventory items you would assign the Retail price level to all items and configure a price; then if you want the Platinum, Gold or Silver customers to pay a different price than Retail, you would then add one or all of these price levels to the item and configure an associated price (calculation method). This allows Platinum, Gold, Silver to serve as exceptions to the Default Price Level.

The following example shows how you can use Price Levels and the methods associated with Price Levels.

Assume that we have defined in the database a Default Price Level of Retail. First, we set up the Retail price level on an item, using the method of your choosing, in this example we will use Absolute, and specify a price of $100. We then decide that we want Platinum customers to pay less because they are preferred customers. Platinum customers pay a percent of the default price so we can use the Percent of Default method when setting up the Platinum price level and configure it to be 85% of the Default Price Level or Retail. Similarly when setting up Gold and Silver who pay 90% and 95% of the Default Price Level respectively are setup up similarly. On an inventory items that does not have special pricing other than the Retail price level, no additional price levels are needed.

In the above example we used an Absolute (A) price of $100 for the example of the Default Price Level. When setting up the Default Price Level, you can use any method except Percent of Default (PD). e-automate can first calculate a either margin or markup and then apply a percent of default rule.

For additional information on using the Inventory Item Utility to update your price levels, see Using the Inventory Item Utility Spreadsheet topic or the Using Spreadsheet Utilities recorded online course in the Customer Resource Center on Digital Gateway’s website.