QuickBooks lets you establish multiple price levels and calculates the resulting prices for you.
No matter how many individual products and/or services you sell, there are most likely times when you want to set special prices for:
- Customer types (residential, commercial, VIP, recurring order, etc.)
- Special promotions, and
- Sales.
You’d spend a lot of time creating invoices and sales orders if you had to calculate these different price levels manually at the time of each sale. QuickBooks makes it easy for you to create global price levels that can be applied on the appropriate sales forms.
Simple Setup
If your business is fairly new, you may have some trouble determining how products and services should be priced. In QuickBooks training classes, you can learn how to build your item records, documenting both the cost of buying and/or producing your offerings and the price at which you’ll sell them.
Once you’ve finalized these standard sales prices for items, you can start developing different levels. Open the Lists menu and select Price Level List. You’ll see a screen like this:
QuickBooks provides tools to help you build a pricing structure that allows you to charge more or less than the standard price for items and services.
Give your price level a name that will be easily understood by any employee filling out sales forms like invoices. You have two options when it comes to the Price Level Type field. You could either give VIP Customers:
- An across-the-board price break by percentage, or
- Custom prices, which would allow you to set discounted prices for each item or service individually. If you select this option, QuickBooks opens a list of related products and/or services and lets you enter VIP prices for each (this is only available in QuickBooks Premier and above).
Simply fill in the blanks and select from the drop-down lists, then click OK. QuickBooks maintains a master list of the levels you’ve established.
Assigning Price Levels to Transactions
You can add and edit price levels at any time, but your new entries will only apply to future transactions. Existing transactions will not be altered.
When you record a sale using an invoice form, for example, fill out the form as you usually do until you get to the Rate column. Click the arrow next to that field, and QuickBooks will display your defined price level options.
Select the appropriate price level in the Rate field.
You can also assign a default price level to an individual customer. This is the price level that will be automatically used when he or she is billed. To do this, open the Customer Center and highlight a customer. Click the edit icon in the upper right (looks like the tip of a pencil) and then click on Payment Settings.
Click the arrow next to the Price Level field and make your selection.
You can also assign prices levels to individual customers.
The mechanics of setting up price levels in QuickBooks are not complicated, but if you’re running into problems because of the complexity of your pricing scheme, a QuickBooks course may be in order.
