Common Characteristics of Price Lists

To begin let's look at some of the common characteristics of price lists.

• price lists are based on a set group of products that your organization sells. These products will be stored in your organization's Product Master file within Pricefx and will contain information like Product SKUs, Product Categories, Business Units, etc. 

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• Price lists have a defined valid from and valid to date, that you can configure based on your organization's pricing schedule.

• Price lists are based on a specific organizational strategy, like Cost Plus, Competition Driven, or Anchored on a certain product or SKU. These are set at an organizational level, so while I'll be referring to the ones in our demo system, what you'll see will vary.

They may also be

• Specific to geography, like Global, Regional or Local

• Specific to a customer or even group of customers

Minimum Requirements

Before you start creating a Price List, make sure that you have at minimum a list of products you wish to create a price for contained within your data.

Also, your organization will have set up standard pricing logic (which ensures price list calculations are performed to meet pricing strategies as well as pricing headers, which you may wish to review and understand ahead of creating a new price list.

Understanding Price List Information

So let's work through the information in the system.

Let's start on the Home Page and navigate to the menu.

Go to 'Price Settings' > 'Price Lists'.

Now we're presented with the list of existing price lists that you have access to. So let's review them to understand what information is available here.

Firstly you want to change the view to see all the information in the headers. So let's click on the first column, called ID, and in the tab that appears, select Autofit All Columns.

Now we can see the column descriptions. Let's move from left to right.

Firstly, there is an ID, this is simply the unique ID given to each price list by the system.

Next, there is the Previous PL, this is the information for the previous price list that this one was created from. If it is blank that means that this is a unique price list, if it's populated you can easily identify the price list that this was created from.

The Name column is simply the name given to that price list for easy identification and something you'll need to input when you create a new list.

You have the Number of items, which is the number of products within this price list, you can see the start and completion date of when the prices were calculated and any warnings or errors for the price list.

The target date shows the date that this is due to go live if it's been fully approved and the expiry date shows when this price list will no longer be valid.

The next four columns all relate to the approval workflow and show the approval state (which it's worth noting at this point that depending on your internal organizational settings some or all of your price lists may need approval). In this case, you can see price lists that are ready to use, that are showing as not approved. This would mean that they didn't need the approval to proceed to ready status. You can see the Workflow status for those that have entered a workflow, you can see the submitter as well as the approval date.

Then you can see the actions that the system will take if there is an error calculating the price of a product. The system can either Abort the entire price list or Skip that particular product. 

You can see the Integration Status if this price list has been integrated with an ERP system for instance, and you can see what User Groups are able to Edit or View the details of the price list.

And then finally you can see the last update date, the Type of price list this is, SIMPLE or MATRIX, who created the price list and who last updated it.

So that's the information you can see in an existing price list 

Creating a New Price List

Let's now work through Creating a price list from scratch.

Product Selection

To do that you simply click on New Price List and you'll be presented with a product selection.

Find and add your products. Here you can search for products by Business Unit, Industry or Product Group, or any other header columns that you have within your data source.

Or if you have the Product IDs elsewhere you could use the Text Entry option and paste the list of them in there.

For this example, you'll remain in the Picker.

I'm not going to select any, which means the system will automatically add all products into this price list. Once you have all the products you want to add click Continue to Parameters.

Calculation Parameters

1. In the 'Set Parameters' step, there are the following options:

• Price List Name. This Identifies the Price List. It defaults to New Price List, and you can amend this to something appropriate.

• Header Type – This allows you to select a pre-built Header for your price list.

Headers contain 3 sections which will appear in the header section of your resulting price list.

1. Logic, which you can use to configure the price list further after creation. This could be something like a geographical, customer, or product filter;   

2. charts for the Price List and

3. a summary with calculation results

However, this is optional.

• Copy preferences from – This allows you to select an existing Price List whose view and edit preferences will be copied to the new Price List. If you don't select this you can manually add these after.

• Allow distributed calculation – For large Price Lists, it will improve the calculation performance as the Price List calculation is done simultaneously. 

• Target Date is the effective date that will be taken into account when looking up Price Parameters. To ensure that all items use the same target date, this value cannot be changed later.

• What action do you want to choose in case the calculation fails? – In case of an error you can either abort the whole calculation or skip just the item and continue.

• Notify me by – If 'Email' is selected, a notification that the Price List calculation has been completed is sent to the user's email address. 

• Default pricing logic – Select the logic that will be used for products that have no pricing logic defined (the product's default pricing logic can be found at Products > Pricing logic column). If a default logic for Price Lists is defined, it will be preselected here. If no selection is made, the application-wide default generic logic will be used.
  Only Active pricing logic(s) with no additional 'Nature' value will show in this drop-down.

This is also where you will determine if this is a global or country-specific price list, dependent on the logic you select.

Here you can see if we select the Independentprice listLogic it presents us with an Independent Level down below, which is set to global.

If you select Dependentprice listLogic, you're presented with both an independent and Dependent Level option. Which you can see provides the countries in which this price list will be valid.

Your organization will have its own logic naming system and you may need to check which one provides the option that you're looking for.

While this demo system shows global and country, your parameters may be completely different.

• Result Price – Determines your Final List Price which can be manually overridden. The drop-down shows all pricing elements from the selected Default pricing logic. If the Default pricing logic is empty, the drop-down here will show all pricing elements from all pricing logic. The resulting price is rounded to 5 decimal places.

• Matrix logic – Optionally define a Matrix Price List. The Matrix Price List is another type of Price List. Through the addition of a second key dimension, prices can be calculated, displayed, and maintained (multiple times) per combination of the SKU (product) and any other dimension, such as country, quantity, customer, etc. With the selection of a 'Matrix  Logic,' a secondary key for a Price List can be defined.

• Matrix logic element – Defines the secondary key field.

• Dynamic UOM – This allows you to specify a logic result field whose UOM will override the product's default UOM. If left empty, the default from the product master is kept.

• Dynamic currency – This allows you to specify a logic result field whose currency will override the product's default currency. If left empty, the default from the product master is kept.

• Define all other pricing parameters defined by the selected logic. (If a pricing parameter is left blank, it will be set to zero.)

• Output Elements on the right – Define the output element's visibility using the check-boxes:

  • Check-box in the first column – If checked, the result of the given element is displayed as a column in the Price List.

  • 'Displayed in QuoteConfigurator' (read-only) – Informs how the visibility of the element is set up in the logic (in Display Mode).

  • 'Hide in item list' – If checked, the given element is not displayed but still available for mapping to an attribute-XX field (for the purpose e.g. integration or filtering from API). However, it is still possible to see the values in the remote procedure call requests data (as it is still part of the data). If you want to use specific view settings as a template and apply it to other Price Lists, you can do so in Defaults for List Calculations in Configuration.

1. So let's click on Create price list and see what happens.

Calculating the Price List

The new Price List gets the status 'Pending' and starts to calculate the prices. 

If needed, you can cancel the calculation by clicking the 'Cancel calculation' button.

The status is not updated automatically but only when you click the 'Refresh' icon.

The time it takes will depend on the number of products it contains and the complexity of the logic employed.

Editing Options

You can now select it and you'll see a range of options appear at the bottom of the window.

This price list is not yet ready to be approved. You may still want to still add products or recalculate the prices. 

Also if you wanted to make any amendments to fields, such as the Expiry Date, User Groups to Edit or view then you do this by double-clicking in the relevant column and making the changes. This is important only the Expiry Date can be amended afterward without creating a new revision.

And when you're ready you can submit it for approval. If you select to make a revision a brand new price list is created.

Once the calculation completes and the status changes to Ready you can now submit the price list for approval.

Price List Workflow

Once that's done you can select the price list and click on View Workflow where you can track its approval status, see the approval User Group and if you wanted you could withdraw the price list from the approval workflow to make changes.

The next step is to navigate to the approvals and approve them. You may not have the authorization to do this and may need to wait for an approver to review and approve it first. 

Assign a Price List to a Customer

And when you return to the price list you will see the approved price list. When you select it, will give you options to assign it to a Customer or Revoke it.

You can find out more details about assigning price lists to customers here.