If you charge different prices depending on the type of customer, you can make use of Sage 50’s (formerly Peachtree) price levels so that the right price will be automatically supplied when entering a quote, sales order, or invoice. It works by:
- Setting up price levels in Inventory Item Defaults
- Entering prices for each item in Maintain Inventory Items
- Assigning customers to price levels in Maintain Customers.
To set up your price levels, go to the Maintain menu; choose Default Information, then Inventory Items. Click on the Price Levels tab. Here you can name and activate up to 5 price levels for Sage 50/Peachtree Pro or 10 price levels for Complete, Premium, or Quantum. By default the price levels are simply numbered, but you can give them names such as Retail and Wholesale or Gold, Silver, and Bronze to make them more meaningful to you. If you don’t need all of the price levels, you can uncheck the Enabled box to prevent someone from adding prices to an unused level. If you want to set up a pricing formula that all items in this price level will use, you can do that by clicking the Edit button that is on the far right. I’ll cover the details for price formulas another time. But it is important to know that the formulas will only be used when you tell Sage 50/Peachtree to recalculate prices. They do not provide you with dynamic pricing that updates instantly when costs change.
Now that you have set up your price levels, you need to add pricing information to your inventory items or services. Go to the Maintain menu and choose Inventory Items. Select an item and click the button that is next to the Price Level field. Now enter the appropriate price for this item on each price level. You can also set up a pricing formula that is unique to this item by clicking the Edit button to the right. Again, price calculation formulas will be discussed another time.
If you prefer a spreadsheet style screen for entering prices instead of selecting each item individually, you can use Maintain – Item Prices instead of Maintain – Inventory Items.
The final step is to assign customers to price levels. Simply go to Maintain – Customers. Select a customer, and then click on the Sales Info tab. In the Pricing Level field select the appropriate choice from the list. All customers get assigned to Price Level 1 when they are first set up so you will only need to change customers that should use a different price level.
Now when you enter an invoice, sales order or quote the correct price level will automatically be applied. The price level feature adds convenience to your data entry without reducing flexibility. You still have the option of selecting a different price level for an item on a transaction or manually entering a new price. Also note that when converting a quote or sales order, the pricing will be transferred to the invoice as it was entered on the quote or sales order, regardless of price levels.
