Overview
One of the biggest time savers in all of TRX Enterprise is price rules. Price rules coupled with the Auto Quotes interface can cut hours out of the workweek for an average company. It used to be that you would get a price sheet from a manufactures, have to look up the item, change the cost and figure your new price. This had to be done hundreds of times for a manufacturer. That does not take into account your special price sheets for high volume and contract customers that had to be created, and item labels that had to be printed for the showroom floor. The amount of manpower needed to constantly keep your inventory current still was not the biggest issue. Because every minute your inventory was not updated, your profit margin was walking out the door.
This scenario goes the way of the dinosaur with TRX Enterprise. Now with a click of a button you can take a digital file from the Auto Quotes manufacturer updates, and within minutes, update a whole manufacture. The Pricing Schedule is where you setup price rules. With proper price rule setup and management those updates will instantly hit the showroom floor, sales force and project teams updating all pricing for volume customers and walk-ins alike; protecting your company's margin from walking out the door. You can even print new item labels based off the manufacturers price update. All this before you finish the morning coffee. In this section we will cover you can make sure you aren’t selling over cost. This guide covers the theory and mechanics behind setting up price rules in TRX Enterprise.
Section one: Price rule initial setup
Section two: Price Rule Theory
Section three: Setting up Price Rules
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Section One: Price rule initial setup
Before you can start creating price rules, you need to put some thought into your initial setup. There are two very important decisions you have to make that will tell TRX enterprise decide how to handle conflicts that will arise. By recognizing these decisions as hard fast rules you develop logic for your price rules that will be easy to understand and maintain.
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pricing conflicts. This is set under the Price Rule Controls tab of the ORD Definitions screen. (ORD>ORD Special Functions>ORD Definitions).
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Resolving conflicts lowest price vs. highest price -
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When two or more
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Price Rules affect the same item, decide whether to use the lower or higher price.
Note: We only recommend using the lowest price to resolve conflicts when using the AQ Interface. This tutorial will be written with only low price logic explained so as not to create confusion. If you must choose the highest price to resolve conflicts, you do so at your own risk!
Enforce contract pricing over price rules – A contract price is considered a "Customer / Item" or a "Customer Type/Item" rule. These rules were created with special priority
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when there is a price contract with a client
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, and it is NOT the lowest price rule. Checking
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allows the TRX user to maintain margins in this situation. By checking this box any customer / item rule will trump all other rules to preserve contract pricing integrity.
Section 2: Price Rule Theory
When you first start setting up TRX and you start looking at the task of creating price rules it can look a bit overwhelming. You have a lot of items and manufactures and you may need different rules for sales orders, POS and volume. Coming up with a strategy can seem very daunting. This section is meant to give you a framework or thought process to organize your plan of attack. This is not by any means the only way to create price rules, but it is a starting point if you do not have one.When you update your manufacturers through auto quotes you are getting new costs basis
Auto Quotes/FEDA updates will update item costs and list prices. If you create rules that work off of either one of these your Create rules for cost or price, and TRX selling price and volume breaks will automatically update across the system when you update price rulespricing.
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We recommend:
Resolving pricing conflicts to lowest price.
Also, we recommend contract pricing supersede other price rules. By doing this we create an ability to have certain clients set up with static pricing if we need it.
Then, base your price rules off of % mark down from list pricing. You gain better Enforce Contract Pricing over price rules, to allow client specific pricing
Base Price Rules off of % Mark Down from List Pricing.
Better control over profit margins if mark down from list
Mark up from cost (average, standard or last)
runs risk of
hurting good purchasing and passing on that lower cost
Use Purchase assistant and PO
Generator for inventory cost savings
through lower on hand quantities while maintaining customer service levels.
Now that you have set up a frame, you should try to visualize your price rules and kind of a sifter. You can break the fifteen pricing types into three basic levels.
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Manufacture – recommended for ease of management
Item Category
Customer Type
Customer Type / Item Category
22. Because you have made the choice resolve conflicting rules by lowest price you can set your list pricing and then "pull down" pricing to the second level for volume customers, volume vendors, items you need to move or stock a lot of. The second level is what you should spend time managing. These rules should be more liquid as you spot and adjust for inventory and sales trends. The best rules for this task should be:
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This was intended to be an example of how to set up a pricing rule structure and is by no means the only way. Every company has a different philosophy on pricing and we have designed our price rules to accommodate as many of them as we could. Instructions on how to create a price rule are in section 3.
Section 3:
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Setting up price rules
In this section we will explain how to create a price rule in TRX.ORD > Order Entry Special Functions > Pricing Schedule
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Go to ORD > Order Entry Special Functions > Pricing Schedule, you will see the above screen and your cursor will default into the start date.
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