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Intuit
Quickbooks Enterprise Advanced Pricing
New for QuickBooks Enterprise 2014 is an optional subscription feature providing Advanced Pricing options.
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Intuit
QuickBooks Enterprise Advanced Pricing Qty Discounts
The new feature allows you to create rules which provide price-breaks based upon quantity variations.
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Intuit
QuickBooks Enterprise Advanced Pricing Price Scheduling
Another Advanced Pricing options allow you to set prices for specific ‘sell dates’.
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Intuit
QuickBooks Enterprise Advanced Pricing - Exclusive Rule
Price rules include an option to set a rule as 'exclusive', in cases where only that rule will apply.
With an Advanced Pricing Subscription enabled QuickBooks Enterprise 14 automatically changes the prices of items according to price rules you create. So how are price rules different from the price levels we can set in QuickBooks without using Advanced Pricing?
While both price levels and price rules let you tell QuickBooks to automatically change an item's price under certain conditions, price rules allow you to be much more specific about when QuickBooks changes a specific price for an item. You can set up to 100,000 price rules as of the latest release of QuickBooks Enterprise 14.
Price levels allow you to change a price based upon a customer type, but price rules give you the ability to set multiple conditions when QuickBooks changes an item’s price. Each price rule can contain multiple conditions that must be met before QuickBooks changes the sales price. For example, if you want specific customers to receive a discount, but only when they buy specific items, you can set up a price rule using both of these conditions. Your price rule conditions can be set up based on customer, item, sales rep, and class.
If you have been using price levels in QuickBooks prior to acquiring an Advanced Pricing Subscription QuickBooks converts each of the price levels in your company file into new price rules. You can leave these converted rules as they were previously configured (as levels) or you can modify and supplement their conditions as maybe appropriate.
Advanced Pricing also lets you offer discounts based upon specific quantity breaks (price break discounts). For example, QuickBooks can charge different prices when a customer buys 9 or fewer items, a different price for 10 to 19 items and even a different price for 20 or more items.
Other Advanced Pricing options allow you to set prices for specific ‘sell dates’; for example you want to have a clearance sale on certain items over the next 30 days, Advanced Pricing can handle a price variance during those ‘sell’ dates and then return to normal pricing after the period.
Another variable concerns ‘exclusion of items’; let’s say you are having a 30% markdown of all jewelry in your store except ‘loose diamonds in excess of 1 karat’; you could exclude those items from the markdown price rule.
You can also elect to make a price rule exclusive, in which the price rule cannot be combined with any other price rule that might be in effect. So in the above example, you could offer a price rule on the loose diamond stock of 10% mark down during the same ‘sale’, but that rule could not be combined with the 30% markdown.
Because Advanced Pricing is a subscription service for QuickBooks Enterprise customers, I think we have to ask ourselves if these features are really worth the added price of the subscription. Intuit apparently feels that enough of their high level inventory users within the QuickBooks Enterprise family need these capabilities that they will be willing to shell out the additional annual fee of nearly $400; at the same time they did not include these advanced price features in the Advanced Inventory subscription, so even Advanced Inventory users will have to pay for an additional subscription if they need these new Price Rules.
Many of these price concepts have been available in the Point-of-sale product for some time, and yet even with that experience behind them, this new feature for QuickBooks Enterprise-14 has had more than its fair share of bugs. Much of my early testing was seriously flawed, and in some cases non-existent because feature aspects didn’t work correctly or at all. More than a dozen ‘bug’ fixes to this feature were just pushed out in the R3 maintenance update for Enterprise 14, so while these may have resolved many of the issues, I wish I could say that I am completely comfortable with this new feature, but I am not.
I simply don’t believe that anyone should, as of yet, be ‘paying extra’ for a feature that doesn’t work perfectly, and one which may well be more costly than it deserves to be.