Method Community

Many of our customers have different negotiated prices for our different types of service offerings.  While the basic table would be the same for all customers, what is the best way to set up Method so that the prices within the customer pricing table could be different for each customer?  Also, not all customers use all the types of services, so only the services used by a particular customer need to have their prices displayed in that customer's screen information.  What would be the best way to set this up as well?  Checkboxes? 

Thanks in advance for any help and suggestions provided!

Dan A.

Hi Dan,

For the first part of the question, I believe what you may be looking for are price levels. We have a blog post on Price Levels that can help you set this up. 

As for the second part of your question, I'm quite sure what you're trying to do. Where are you displaying these prices? On the Edit Customer screen? If so, why?

- Adam

Thanks Adam, I've now found and printed out the Price Levels information to which you referred in your response.  That's a big help and will manage the majority of our 700+ customers.  However, we still have a few that have very special pricing, such as our "founding clients", or those who came on board with us when we first started our business.  To confirm, if I understand correctly, for these very special clients we can then go to the CustomPrice field and where the Item field equals the InvoiceLineItems:Items value, we can then enter into the actual Rate field into the Grid and then enter the actual value (price) for that customer without affecting the other customers at that price level? 

Regarding the second part of the question, we get numerous phone inquiries from our customers to many of our Method users regarding their pricing for the different types of services (items) we provide them.  Thus, our users need to be able to pull up a customer screen quickly with the price list for each of that customer's services (items).  As I'm new to Method, perhaps there is a better way for them to be able to see these customized prices for each of our customers? 

Thanks so much Adam!

Best,

Dan

Hi Dan,

When you mention "enter into the actual Rate" field, do you mean in the transaction screen? If so, then yes, if you change the rate on the individual transaction, it won't have any affect on the price level. There are many ways to achieve price levels. As long as the price on the transaction is okay, I would think you're good.

For the second part, I think this would be best captured in a grid on screen. The tricky part is how you are going to mark which items or types of services each customer uses and have the prices reflect correctly for each customer. My question to you is how are the service types currently organized. Is there a table that holds this information?

- Adam

Hi Adam,

We'd like the actual rate / price to be able to be seen when viewing a chosen customer's information.  (Most likely I can do this by adding a column for the specific field to the grid.) 

Your second statement in the second paragraph is exactly where I'm going with this as I'm trying to understand what is the best way to do this?  Yes, I have a table that lists each of the different types of services and I desire to show in the customer's information screen a list of each of the different services that customer uses from us, (through a selection process from either the edit or new customer grid) along with the correct rate / price for them.  What I've not figured out is whether I will have to recreate the table for each of the 700+ customers (hopefully not!) or if we can use a common table but with different rate / price, as appropriate, for the customers who don't fit perfectly within the set "levels" of pricing? 

Thanks for any help and guidance you can provide with this?

Best,

Dan

Hi Dan,

What I'm kind of envisioning is a custom item table, similar to how our InvoiceLineItem table works.  The InvoiceLineItem table holds all of the items used in invoices. I will also hold the price that was set on the invoice. It acts as a separate item list. What you might be able to do is create your own type of table like this for customer items.

This would essentially be a large table of items and their associated customer recordID's (and of any other fields you want to include). For example if an item or service is used by 3 customers, there would be 3 records of this item, one for each customer recordID. Similar to how each InvoiceLineItem has a specific invoice.  You can then use this table as your grid, and filter for the specific customer that is opened (ie. You enter the Edit Customer for the customer with recordID 10, the grid filters for only records that have customer recordID 10).

- Adam

Hi Adam,

From what I'm reading, I believe you've fully got it now!   :)   The one final part to this is that we'll be able to add / update or remove the selected services a customer chooses to use in the customer edit or new screens; and while the prices for those services will display, only the designated user(s) with permission will be able to edit the prices. 

So now -- as a fairly new client to Method and still learning about all the amazing capabilities of Method customizations -- how (and where) would you best recommend I go about setting this up?

Thanks so much!

Dan

Dan,

Okay, then I'd employ the suggestion from the other post about show/hiding grids based on the logged in user. For your grid that can add/update/delete, take a look at how the InvoiceLine grid functions. You can reverse engineer that screen to see how to set the grid up. 

One of the best ways to learn ito customize is to find a similar function in another screen, then copy and edit that screen to see how it works.  Then apply it to your use case.

Instead of having lines where you select items like the InvoiceLine screen, you can use a function similar to the CRM_ActivityTypeList screen, where you input the information and insert it into the table.

- Adam

Thanks Adam!  We'll see how it goes.....

Happy holidays!

Dan

Happy Holiday to you too!

- Adam