Creating Price Books

Creating Price Books

When setting up your Mobileforce CPQ application, one of the first things that an Administrator will want to do is to create one or more price books for your company. A price book lists the product and services that you are selling to your customers and lists the standard price for these items. You cannot create a proposal in Mobileforce CPQ without a price book.

Mobileforce CPQ supports the creation of multiple price books. Many organizations utilize a single price book; however, if you are offering goods and services at a different rate due to geographic location, currency, or customer segment, you may want to create multiple pricebooks to reflect this model. Price books can be related to each other via a hierarchical parent relationship.

Once you have created your price book, you can then add products and services to it as well as set price entries for those products. For more information, see Adding Price Book Entries for your Product.

Note:
The addition of multiple price-book-entries for a single product, is done during the product creation, within the pricing tab, under the section "Price Book Entries".

Alternatively, one can also view all the price book entries associated with a specific Price Book, by navigating to the Price Books (Screenshot below) and clicking on the "$" symbol.

In the List View screen for all Price Book Entries, one can also add a Price Book Entry (for the chosen Price Book), by clicking on the "Add" button.

When sellers create new quotes for a proposal, they first select the price book before adding the products, as line items, to the quote. Based on the selected price book, Mobileforce adds the correct product incarnation (correct price, quantities, discounts, etc.) for the quote.

Typically, a product is only listed once in a price book; however, your business needs may require you to create multiple product entries for the same product. For example, you could have product entries that have different minimum and maximum quantities or product entries that each have different effective and expiration dates.

Price books are created and managed from the Price Books List View page, which you can access by selecting Price Books from the CPQ Setup page.

Adding a price book

To add a price book, click the button to open the Add Price Book page.

Specify the following:

When you create a price book, Mobileforce CPQ automatically populates the metadata values (such as Created Time) for the price book.

When finished, click the Create button to add the price book to the price book list.

Hierarchical price books

You can organize your price books to be in a heirarchical configuration. Any price book can be a parent price book to a child price book. This has several benefits:

Price books lists the product and services of their immediate parent price book.

Example
You can organize your price books in a heirarchy to distinguish between a standard price book (the parent) and a customized price book (its child).

This can be useful when you have products in your main catalog (the parent price book) that are excluded from a specific region (the child), or where you have a standard price (the parent price book) for a product, but a specific store or vendor (the child price book) has a reduced price.

Additionally, you can use price books when discounting products or creating short-term promotions. In the parent entry you can specify the base price for a product, and apply discounts to the child entry for the product. This allows you to easily revert to the standard price when the promotion or discount is over by deleting the child entry.

Access Controls

The Access Controls section of the Price Book page allow you to determine who can view and use the price book. You can specify the following options:

Active

A toggle switch that allows you to determine whether the price book is accessible to users. Yes is selected by default. To hide the pricebook, ensure that No is selected.

ACL

The access control list (ACL) for the price book. Allows you to create a list of rules that specifies which users or systems are granted or denied access to the price book.

For example, you can specify that only users who are Technicians and Manager can access the price book.

Effective Date

The effective date allows you to specify the date when the price book can be accessed by users from the Quote tab.

Expiration Date

The expiration date allows you to specify the date after which the price book can no longer be accessed by users from the Quote tab.

Adding products to your price book

Once the price book is created you can add products to it. For more information about adding products, see Adding Products to Mobileforce CPQ.

Adding and reviewing price entries

You can view all of the price entries for the products in a price book. From the Price Books page, click the button for the desired price book. The Prices page displays, allowing you to manage the existing price entries, as well as create new entries.

Note:
Typically, each price book has a single price entry for each product. However, your business needs may require you to create multiple entries, based on the method of sale (for example, Per Unit versus Volume) or an entries that have different effective and expiration dates.

Selecting Price Books

If you wish to select a specific price book from many price books, perhaps based on the country you're selling to, or some customer characteristics, this can be achieved as follows:

  1. You can specify a form-expression for the value of the cpq_price_book field. This field contains the price book’s name, not its ID. Do not modify the hidden cpq_price_book_id field.

  2. You can then read price books from the easyclm MFCPQPriceBook table. For example:

     <input name="cpq_price_book" type="text" value="=DTLOOKUPVALUE('easyclm-','MFCPQPriceBook',&quot;currency='@currency_code'&quot;,'name')" readonly="1" reportable="1"/>

Note that if you leave the cpq_price_book field as type ‘picklist’, you cannot change the loaded picklist items. It’s hard-wired into the system. If you need a filtered picklist, you will need to create a new picklist field then set cpq_price_book to its value via a form expression.

  1. Setting the pricebook will not cause the quote currency prefixes (e.g., $, €), to change immediately. They will not change until a save or a price computation is triggered. You can cause a field to trigger a price computation by adding a ‘cpq_action_update_prices’ change action to the field. This action is only triggered when a user modifies the field. Fields updated by form-expressions will not trigger change actions.

In order to populate currency sign dynamically into a proposal template based on price book selected, one can create two distinct document templates: One with Currency1 (e.g., EURO) and the other with Currency2 (e.g., GBP) and then add a rule in each document template to hide or show the document template based on selected price book : in the "Generation Restrictions" section, as a hidden condition (based on the selected price book)

There are some restrictions on price books.

Note
We have no means to add custom fields to price books. Also, price books have no country field. Instead, they have a three-letter currency code, (e.g., USD, EUR, CAD, AUD.). So, you will either need to convert the country to a currency code, or store the country and other info in either the price-book’s name or description fields.