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Customizing Method CRM: Price Levels

Hi! This is Jason from the support team, and today I’m going to talk about how to customize price levels! "Price levels" is a feature in QuickBooks Desktop that allows you to set custom pricing for different customers or jobs.

I have found that many users ask me how to use price levels in Method, and I tell them that although they are not built into the stock Method screens, they can be customized! But how? There are a few ways you can go about it, but here is one way I find works well for me.

Sometimes the most difficult part about customizing is deciding where to start. I’ve found the best place to begin is figuring out where to put our actions. A good question to ask yourself is “when should the actions be triggered”? The best place to trigger them might be when you add or change an item, or in Method language, a Text Change action. Here’s how we get to those actions from screen designer of the stock Quickbooks_Invoice screen:

Edit the InvoiceLineItems grid
Skip to Step 2 of 9: Grid Columns
Click the Actions link on the Item row
Change the event to Text Change

Now for the fun part... adding actions! We’ll start by adding a few more Retrieve Value From Table actions and placing these values into action results. We need to find the:

PriceLevel field from the Customer table (we’ll call it resultPriceLevel)
PriceLevelType field from the PriceLevel table (we’ll call it resultPriceLevelType)
PriceLevelFixedPercentage field from the PriceLevel table (we’ll call it resultPriceLevelFixedPercentage)

You will need to use these action results later!

The next step is to actually add the dollar amounts to the Rate field on the items grid to reflect the new price levels. We want to retrieve values from the PriceLevelPerItemRetList table, so why not try another Retrieve Value from Table action? Here’s a hint: find the CustomPrice field where the PriceLevel field equals our resultPriceLevel action result from earlier, AND where the Item field equals the InvoiceLineItems:Items value from the screen. You can then place the resulting value in the InvoiceLineItems:Rate field in the grid.

Now, this works great for price levels at the per item level, but what about fixed percentage price levels? Well, you might start with a Start Conditional Statement action and use our resultPriceLevelType action result from earlier. You want the Start Conditional Statement action to say, if the price level type is “FixedPercentage”, then perform the following actions (You should also use Start and End Conditional Statements elsewhere in your action set that account for all price level scenarios). You could then use a few sequential Basic Math Calculation actions to calculate the new rate. Finally, don’t forget to add your final calculation to the Rate field in the grid! Use an Enter Value into Field on Screen action to do so.

Remember, this is just one way to add price levels. There are many different ways, and more features you can add. This tutorial is for users with a basic knowledge of customization in Method, but if you didn’t understand it then don’t sweat! Click here for our webinars page and you will find webinars about customization near the bottom. It’ll be worth it, because you can do just about anything you can imagine with customization! Also, if you have questions about this post, feel free to ask about it on our forums. We would be happy to help!

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