Preliminary Look at QBO Price Rules 'Beta'

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Liz has been off the last two weeks teaching the ProAdvisor Master Class so I figured it was my turn to actually write something about QuickBooks Online, and wouldn't you know, I lucked out with the recent availability of the new 'Beta' version of Price Rules for QBO.

Price rules let you control the price of your products. You can offer discounts (or increases) on specific products for some, or all, of your customers for a specified amount of time.  Examples include:

  • Set up a 10% holiday discount for your customers on all of your products
  • Create a special 15% discount promotion on specific products that aren’t selling as well as expected
  • Offer a discount on certain product prices to your favorite customers, family members and friends.

Setting-up Price Rules

There are several different steps that need to take place in order for you to use Price Rules within QuickBooks Online.

Turning-on Price Rules

To enable price rules, go to the Gear Icon, then select Account and Settings, then choose the Sales tab. Click on the pencil icon under Products and Services, then check the box next to “Turn on price rules ‘Beta’.” Then click ‘Save’.

Creating a Price Rule

To create a Price Rule go to the Gear Icon, then select All Lists, then choose ‘Price Rules’ from the list page. 

When the Price Rules page appears, select ‘New Price Rule’.

Set the fields based upon the rule parameters, in this example:

Rule name:  Holiday Sale 10% Discount

Start date: 12/01/2016

End date: 12/25/2016

Select customers: All customers

Select products or services:  All products and services

Set sales price or rate by: Percentage

Percentage: Decrease by

% (value): 10%

Rounding: No rounding

Here is a closer illustration of the essential fields for Price Rules:

Then click ‘Apply’, and then click ‘Save and close’.

When you look at your Price Rule you can see that it has been applied to those services with an actual sales price, as evidenced by the green circle below. However, it has not been applied where products and services had no sales price (as seen in red box below).

This is very important because your products and services need to already have their sales price established in order for the Price Rule to compute the ‘adjusted price’ applicable under the rule.

Using Price Rules on Transactions

Create a Sales Receipt or Invoice normally.  When you enter an Item with an associated Price Rule, the computed rate of the price rule will be displayed in the Rate column of the transaction if the Sales Rule is active. You can either accept the Price Rule value, or you can click on the Rate field to select an alternative rate as shown in the illustration below.

In this case you will notice that the same 10% discount Price Rule has been applied to all three of my items included within the Product and Service list that had assigned values, as shown below.

It works pretty well, in fact it works exactly the way I would expect it to work for this example. I suspect we will find a few 'bugs' with this, after all it is a 'Beta' feature. However, this is a nice holiday gift. I'm sure that Intuit is hoping that QBO ProAdvisors will be making use of this Beta-feature to identify issues so that they can be dealt with prior to the actual feature release in prime time.

Liz may be writing a follow-up on other aspects of using this new Price Rule feature in the future.  She and I will also be including this feature in our 'Closer Look' at the New QBO Sales Tax and Price Rules version of QB Talks on January 10, 2018. So stay tuned for more details.