Tips & Tricks - Pricing and Categorizing Customers - Let's speed up the process!

Do you service different types of customers? This can include Retail, Commercial, or Fleet accounts. You might have two Fleet accounts that get charged different prices or, you might have special employee prices. How do you offer different pricing to all your customers? You can always manually change each price in a workorder, but that can be time consuming. AutoFluent® provides a time-saving solution built into the system. Price levels and Sales Categories allow those with permission to change the pricing tier for each customer, which means you don’t have to manually adjust the prices of items on every workorder. You can change these inside workorders as a one time offer, or edit the customer’s sales settings individually to continue using them.

Price Levels

Price levels are names given for different price rates, and are often used in conjunction with Sales Categories. Setting a specific price level for each type of customer helps speed up the process of adjusting prices. AutoFluent® allows you to have up to 12 normal price levels. If you need additional price levels, you can utilize Special Price Levels, which you can read about in our previous article by clicking here.

Let’s say your employee, Mike, needs some work done, and your shop offers employee rates. Instead of changing the prices or giving discounts directly on Mike’s workorder, you want to create a price level that will have AutoFluent® automatically bring up prices at the employee rate from now going forward. To create your employee price level you will need to go to “Setup Entry” (gear icon in upper right corner of the homepage) and click the “Price Levels” button. In the “Standard Price Levels” tab, click inside the “Price Level Names” column to rename a price level (retail, commercial, employee, etc). Since we need an employee rate, we will name a price level “Employee,” then save the changes. If you own a multistore database, the “Hide at this location?” checkbox can come in handy.

Now that we have created a price level for your employees, you can create and save prices in this price level for all your inventory items. Price changes can be done to each item individually, or collectively using the Price Changes tool or Item Group Markups. If you need assistance with applying price changes with these tools, contact AutoFluent® Support! Next, we will need to create an “Employees” Sales Category, and lastly assign the “Employee” price level and sales category to Mike’s customer record.

Sales Categories

Sales Categories allow you to categorize your customers based on their type, such as Retail, Commercial, or Fleet. This allows you to report the total sales per Sales Category, as seen on the Daily Report or any of the Customer Transaction Reports. Each Sales Category will be assigned a default price level. Let’s create an “Employee” sales category and assign the “Employee” price level we’ve created as its default price level. We will be able to adjust the sales category directly inside the workorder or in Mike’s customer profile in Customer Entry .

To access the Sales Categories window, open “Setup Entry,” and select “Sales Categories”.Click “New”, and then enter a Code, Name, Price Level, and Default Tax Type. The code is just an abbreviation of a name you want. For this example, we will enter “Emp” for the code, and "Employee” for the name. We will assign the Price Level we created earlier, “Employee”. The Tax Type you select would depend on the type of customer. For our employees, we will use the ”Local” Tax Type. Once you have everything set, you will need to “Save Changes.” To make sure these system changes are applied, we recommend restarting AutoFluent® by completely exiting and reopening the software.

Let’s apply the change to Mike’s customer profile now. Open “Customer Entry” and select Mike. Open the “Sales” tab and use the drop down menus to assign the newly created Sales Category “Employee” and the Price Level “Employee.” Click “Save Changes.” 

Still have questions? We can help! Contact AutoFluent® Support to see how Price Levels and Sales Categories can easily help you with pricing and reporting!