Whether you’re new to the IT services business or a veteran of the trade, we’re sure that you’ve already learned that, sometimes, both you and your customers benefit from custom pricing arrangements.
And there are a variety of customized pricing options that you can provide your customers, such as a global discounts, markups, or unique rates or pricing for a particular item or technician. For some customers, you might want to extend these special prices to all services or items, while, for others, you might want to reserve these special pricing options for a particular job or contract.
Even though applying these customized pricing options would benefit you, the idea of managing customized prices and rates probably seems awfully daunting, possibly even daunting enough to discourage you from offering your customers unique pricing. Instead of limiting yourself to standard prices and rates in order to make your workload more bearable however, we’d like to offer you an easy alternative: Our PSA’s Custom Pricing feature.
Available in both the Accounts and Contracts windows, the Custom Pricing feature enables you to set global discounts/mark ups, unique hourly rates for specific employees or items, and to create exceptions for each customized pricing agreement. With this feature, you can customize pricing and rates in as many ways you want and the PSA does the hard work of applying the unique pricing and rates for you.
In other words, after you give the custom pricing feature instructions for either a specific Account or Contract, you and other users never again have to worry about the pricing arrangements for these Accounts or Contracts. No matter how complicated or tailored the pricing is, the app will automatically adjust Charges entered by you or other users to meet the Custom Pricing criteria you set. With custom pricing, your technicians merely need to log their hours (labor), parts and expenses, and the PSA software does the complicated math.
So, how does this work?
Well, let’s start by taking a look at Custom Employee Rates. These customized rates can apply to either labor items using hourly rates by an employee or an expense item using hourly rates by an employee. Moreover, these customized rates can apply to a single employee or to all employees.
To customize employee rates, go to either the Accounts or Contracts window. If you set the custom pricing in the Accounts window, it will apply to all charges to the specific customer; if you set the custom pricing in the Contracts window, the custom pricing will only apply to the specific Contract you select.
Once you have selected the window’s Custom Pricing tab, you can customize rates for all employees (Global Employee Rate Settings) and create exceptions for the custom hourly rates using the tools on the left hand side of the screen, under Employee Hourly Rates.
By clicking “Edit” alongside the Employee Hourly Rates, you will be taken to the Global Setting for Employee Hourly Rates window, in which you can set customized, global employee rates.
In this window, you can choose to use standard rates for all employees (as set in the Employee window), use fixed rates for all employees, adjust the standard rate for all employees by a percent (either discount or markup), and select the degree to which the adjusted rates should be rounded.
To create exceptions for specific employees, click the “New” icon to the right of the Employee Exceptions area. This will open an the Employee Rate Exception Window.
In this window, you can set special rates for a selected employee that will override any other employee rates that have been set in the system. The rate you enter under Custom Rate will be the fixed rate used whenever a charge for this employee is added under either the Contract or Account, depending on how you setup the custom pricing.
Like with customized employee rates, you can also create customized pricing for products, labor and expense items that have a price based on units or hours. To customize these prices, you would need to go to either the Accounts or Contracts window and select the Custom Pricing tab.
This time, focus on the right hand side of the screen, under Fixed Price Items.
By clicking “Edit” alongside the Stand Item Prices box, you are taken to a Global Setting for Fixed Priced Items window in which you can customize pricing rules for all items, including labor, parts and expenses.
Like the Global Settings for Employee Hourly Rates window, in this window, you can choose to use standard prices for all items, adjust prices for all items based on a percentage (discount or markup), select the degree to which you want the software to round the customized pricing, and whether you want the customized pricing to apply to parts, expenses, labor, or any combination thereof.
If you want to create an exception for a specific item for which you do not want to apply a standard or customized rate, you can override the item’s pricing by creating a new Fixed Price Item exception.
In the Add/Update Item Price Exception Rule window, you can select an item, see its standard price, and enter in the custom price at which you want to create charges for either the Account or Contract.
By giving you the power to create customized pricing for your customers and for particular contracts without the headache of applying the unique prices, the app helps you tailor not only your service, but also your prices to your customers. In the end, that means happier customers and a healthier business.
Enjoy harnessing the power of customized pricing!
Until next time,
Success Team