When entering Companies and Products, you can allocate them to specific Price Groups. Additionally, when you set up Business Types (in the Data Manager), these can be allocated Price Groups as well. If ‘Schools’ is one of your Business Types, for example, you might allocate to that Business Type the educational Price Group. When you then enter a Company, you can specify its Business Type on page 1 of the Companies screen. Once you have done this and that Company places an Order, when entering Order Items, Daybook will look to the Price Group for the Company or, if none has been entered, to the Price Group for the Business Type, and find a specific Price Table record relating to the Product Code.
Since you can allocate a Price Group to a Product as well, there is a possibility of more that one Price Table being applicable to each Order Item. Therefore, there is a specific order of preference when entering an Order Item as to which Price Table is used. First, the specific Company Price Group takes precedence over that entered for the Business Type if both are specified. When Price Table entries are found for the relevant Price Group, the order of precedence is a follows: Product Code match; Product Group and Brand match; Product Group match, Product Brand match, no Product, Group or Brand and the same Company as the client; and, finally, no Product and no Company.
The last of these would apply if you had a Price Table entry giving a 20% discount with no other settings, allocated to a Price Group which in turn was not allocated to a Company or Business Type, and the result would be a very frequently applied discount!
Note that when you are allocating Price Groups to Companies and Products you are performing a more general action than the allocation of a single Company in a Price Table record. It can still be logical to allocate Companies to Price Table entries, despite the fact that it appears to be duplicating the allocation of a Price Group on the Company screen, because if you have entered a very general discount (for example, by Business Type) as just described, you could override it for a given Company with a specific Price Table entry.
The Products screen permits you to view related Price Table entries by means of the View menu. The list that is shown includes any Price Table entry connected in any way (ie, via Product Code, Group or Brand) to the Product. However, it also includes entries not allocated to any Product, because Price Table entries with no Product references could apply if allocated to Companies or Business Types. The list is sorted so that those with Product Codes appear at the top, followed by those with Groups, then Brands and finally those with no Product information will appear at the bottom.
Although complex and flexible, the Price Matrix fulfils a simple aim of offering the correct default price when entering Order items. Its design is such that it can be called into action rarely or frequently, depending on your individual requirements.
It can be used in conjunction with the Multi-currency companion when entering Orders and Invoices. In these situations, if a foreign currency is used, and if there is no Price Table entry for a given Product for that currency, a message appears asking if you would like to convert the standard Sales Price at the current conversion rate.
It can also be used in the Service Control volume to bring Contract Rates in automatically when entering Service Contracts. Full details of this procedure are to be found in the Service Control manual.