When you want to make changes to large groups of Products all at once, Set Selling Prices and Set Product Info are the tools you will use. Set Selling Prices will modify the costing and pricing information of your Products, based on criteria you choose, while Set Product Info will modify Product attributes. Each modification is known as an "action", and may be applied once, manually, or many times, automatically.
When your Products are entered in the Products database, you may wish to set their Selling Prices to a fixed price or one calculated from either the default Cost or an alternate Cost associated with a particular Pricing Level. This can be done according to their Family, Class, or other category by batch rather than individually, in the interest of saving time. To do this, choose the Set Selling Prices option of the Tools menu. There, select subsets of your Products using a series of filters that will allow changes to be applied to only those Products that meet your chosen criteria.
The Rules and Apply buttons at the bottom of the Set Selling Prices and Set Product Info windows perform similar functions, but at different times. "Apply" will set the current Action to existing Products affected by the Criteria at the moment it is used. "Rules" will allow you to save the Action to perform on future Products or existing Products being modified, automatically.
Once you have the subset you wish to change, you are able to decide if you want to simply set the Fixed Price, or to calculate a markup using a percentage, a dollar value, or a combination of the two.
In addition, you can set the Sell Price for the alternate Pricing Levels you’ve created (in the Pricing Level setup option in the Tools menu), allowing you to customize pricing for different categories of your Customers. You may also specify which Cost on which to base this calculation; the standard Cost, a Cost associated with a certain Pricing Level, or the Cost Average. To do this, use the pull-down menu that allows you to set “Sell” to select the Pricing Level, and using the adjacent pull-down menu, select the particular Cost you wish to use. Click Apply to apply this action to the affected Products.
Example: You have a repair shop that can order service parts from with an exchange cost or a stock cost, depending on whether or not you’re sending back a dead part for credit. You would create an alternate Pricing Level to reflect an exchange, and then indicate that the Pricing Level sets the Cost particular to that level. (ie. A hard drive would cost $100 if a defective one were sent back, but $200 if not). You then use Set Selling Prices to mark up the Selling Price for that alternate Pricing Level using the special Cost you have when you send a defective part back.
You can also set your Costs for default and non-default Suppliers by choosing to set “Cost” using one of the available options. However, it is essential that you choose the Supplier whose Cost you are changing at the bottom of the Set Selling Prices window. The Make Default Cost checkbox will not only modify the Supplier Cost in the Product Card when enabled, it will also mark the Supplier Cost as that Product’s Default Cost. Not enabling the checkbox will only modify the Supplier’s Cost, and leave it as non-default in the Product card.
You may create a Live Rule to save any of these criterion/action combinations and have them applied automatically when new Products are created or existing ones modified. After having set the Criteria for your Action, click the Rules button. A drawer appears which allows you to name and save the current criteria. When you click Save, the Rule will appear in the upper section along with a checkbox; checking this box will make the rule “live”, and it will be automatically applied when you click the Save button of any Product which meets the criteria. Leaving a rule as "not live", or unchecked, simply allows you to recall the rule (similar to a "Preset" in Import Tools) to apply it manually.
You will be asked to agree with a dialog box before any Live Rules are applied.
In addition to setting the Selling Prices or Costs for your Products, you may also need to make batch changes to one or more fields in your Product profiles. Set Product Info allows you to search subsets of your Products in a similar way as the Set Selling Prices feature, and apply an Action. By selecting the options from the pop-up menus in the Criteria section, you can specify the Products you wish to change. Then, set the Action in the section below to change the appropriate field in the selected Products.
The Rules and Apply buttons behave the same way they do in Set Selling Prices.
