Special Pricing

CAPITAL supports two special pricing systems: Customer Special Pricing and Supplier Special Pricing.

Customer and Supplier Special Pricing can also be used in combination with each other.

Example: Using Customer & Supplier Special Pricing In Combination

You are a product distributor. Your company receives a lower cost price from your manufacturer when you on-sell to another manufacturer or distributor.

One way to handle this would be to:

Add a new Supplier Special Price Rule.
Assign the supplier's code to the Supplier field.
Assign the customer account code or customer category code representing the group of customers who receive the lower price to the Account field.
Tick Apply to Sales.

When you tick Apply to Sales two things occur:

The price rule is ignored (skipped over) when you write a normal purchase order or stock receipt.
The cost recorded on this rule is assigned to any sales related transaction such as sales orders, quotations and invoices. This ensures that your sales analysis will be accurate.

Assuming you are using sales orders to record sales, you can use CAPITAL to automatically generate a purchase order for these customers with the correct price by doing the following:

Select Automatic Purchasing - Based on Back Orders.
Specify the Category of customer that receives the special price.
Ensure that Itemise Back Orders is selected.

This procedure will generate an itemised purchase order for each customer for which you receive a lower cost price.

You can, of course, still raise a purchase order manually and enter the lower cost price. This is easy to do so long as the cost price is represented in one of the cost fields in Stock Control. This is done by selecting from the menu Options|Set Cost Pricing and temporarily setting a different cost price. However, if you do raise purchase orders manually you must also track the required reorder quantities manually.

Group Matching

If you are assigning discounts based on stock group or supplier group matching, be aware that CAPITAL allows partial matching. For example if your product is assigned to stock group "A60" then any rule that specifies stock group "A6" or even stock group "A" will apply. This can be a useful short-cut when you have many sub-groups, but it can also be a potential pitfall if your group "A6" is entirely separate from your group "A".

In order to do an exact comparison match, you should enter the same group code in the To field. For example, if you enter "A" in the Stock Group field and "A" in the To field, then that rule will only apply to stock items assigned to stock group "A".

The matching type for each category of rule is as follows:

Stock Groups Partial Matching

Supplier Groups Partial Matching

Customer Categories Partial Matching

All others Exact Matching

In other words, departments and locations must exactly match. Location "52" is not the same as Location "5" (and any comparison between the rule and the stock item's location would consequently fail). However, for customer categories, the category "1" would match "10", "1B", "1NSW", etc.

Hints & Tips

When invoicing, ordering or quoting, if the quantity column on a transaction is altered, CAPITAL will not update the sell price unless a quantity rule has also been specified for the changed quantity. See the tip below.
When specifying quantity break pricing it is a good idea to also specify a price rule for a single unit purchase, even if the rule is merely a repeat of the default/standard price. This will ensure that the price will automatically be adjusted if an operator goes back and reduces the quantity ordered. That is to say, if there is a price rule in the system to give a customer a better price for purchasing a larger quantity, you should also put a price rule in the system for purchasing smaller quantities.

An example will help illustrate this. If there is a price rule for a "50" or "100" unit purchase, and then the operator changes the units purchased to "40", the previous price break will not be altered since there is no price rule for 50 items or less in the rules table.
CAPITAL's Special Pricing will not override the last assigned price unless there is a matching special price rule in the system.
This is something operators can easily miss if they are depending on the Special Price Table to always calculate the correct sell price.
Rules that are highlighted in red by CAPITAL are rules that cannot be true under any circumstances, given your current account/rule settings. For example, assigning a customer account code to a Price Group "B" rule when the discount code for that customer is "A".

Special Pricing - Performance Issues

A large number of price rules can slow down stock item entry considerably. Careful organisation of your rules can greatly minimise this effect.

These suggestions can potentially speed-up price rule access:

Move specific price rules for specific customers to the Customer Stock Item Pricing Table instead of the more general Special Pricing Table.
All global rules are scanned first. (These are rules with blank Price Group codes.) Try to minimise the number of globals you specify. CAPITAL must check each one every time you enter a product on a transaction.
Organise your customer pricing into Price Groups. A Price Group is created when you issue a non-numeric discount, i.e., "A", "B", "CC", "SPECIAL", "RATEA", etc., to a customer's Discount field.

This can save a considerable amount of time because CAPITAL only has to check a specific set of price group rules, rather than a much larger number of rules all lumped together globally.

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