Tip of the Month for September 2010
Price Schedules
Price Schedules were added to Answers in the 2008 release and provide a way to setup consistent customer pricing (including rebates) across multiple customers. They are setup very similar to Customer Price Exceptions, however once setup, they can be applied to as many customers as needed. With Price Exceptions, if you wanted to give the same pricing to another customer, you had to use the "Copy" feature in Price Exceptions or Contracts to accomplish this. This in turn made it more difficult to maintenance them as changes were made in the future. While the "Copy" feature would allow updating over existing exceptions, you could still get into confusion in some cases as to which should take precedence (the exception being copied from or the one already setup for a customer). Price Schedules were introduced to simply the management of special pricing that spans multiple customers.
Price Schedules provide the same features as Customer Price Exceptions which include the ability to give customers a specific price level, specific $ price, discount %'s (including markups), and various types of rebates. They also can be applied to individual stock numbers, product codes, vendors, and catalog section codes. They can be set to expire on a certain date or never to expire, and expiration dates can even vary by customer. Think of Price Schedules as a group of pricing exceptions that can apply to multiple customers and giving you one central place to manage them in Order Processing-->File Maintenance-->Price Schedule Management.
You can also combine the use of Price Schedules and individual Customer Price Exceptions even on the same customers. This means you can still negotiate special deals with individual customers that may be different than a Price Schedule that you have the customer setup to use. The system can be setup to give the customer the best price found or individual Customer Price Exceptions can be setup to always override any Price Schedules that may conflict. Customers can even be placed on multiple Price Schedules. For example, you might setup different schedules for different vendors or different classes of products.
When you setup a Price Schedule, you will give it a unique name to identify it along with a comment and possible expiration date. You will then proceed to enter all the details of the Price Schedule. This step is very much like setting up individual customer price exceptions except that you are setting up exception pricing for the Price Schedule instead of for just one customer. These can continue to have all of the flexibility listed above in the 2nd paragraph. Then when you are done setting up the details, you have an additional tab where you can assign customers to this Price Schedule. Customers can also be assigned to Price Schedules in Customer Maintenance using the Price Exception icon on the toolbar.
For more detailed information on Price Schedules go to Order Processing-->File Maintenance-->Price Schedule Management and click on the help icon.