Price lists in Business Central

Prices, discounts and campaigns often live in spreadsheets, because the old price setup in BC was hard to get an overview of. The new pricing experience gathers prices and discounts in price lists with status and dates. Here you see how price lists work, how BC picks the price on a line, and what you should check before you start. You also get a short checklist to get started.

Status: check Feature Management

Microsoft writes that the new pricing experience was introduced in 2020 release wave 2. New customers use it. For existing customers it depends on whether the administrator has turned on the update New sales pricing experience in Feature Management. We cannot confirm this for your particular environment, so open Feature Management and check the status before you plan.

How a price list is built

A Sales Price List belongs to a customer, a customer price group or a campaign and has a validity range with dates and currency. The Applies-to field and the number decide who the list applies to. New lists have status Draft, and drafts are not included in price calculation. You activate the list by setting the status to Active.

You can add lines manually, with Suggest Lines, which retrieves item prices, or with Copy Lines from another list. The Defines field chooses whether the line is a price, a discount or both.

Bulk price adjustments

To raise prices by a percentage, you create a new list as a draft and copy lines from the old one with an adjustment factor, for example 1.15 for 15 percent up. Afterwards you can deactivate the old one. You can also use Edit in Excel, but follow Microsoft's steps for new lines: fill in only the line number and the price list code first, and publish before you fill in the rest.

Editing active lists

By default an active list must be set back to draft before you change it. If you turn on Allow Editing Active Price in Sales & Receivables Setup and Purchases & Payables Setup, you can edit directly. Edited lines become drafts and are not included in the calculation until you run Verify Lines. The Price Analyzer page shows prices across lists, and the Price Worksheet is used to add and implement changes.

How BC picks the price

The price is the lowest price with the highest line discount on the date. BC uses the customer in the Bill-to Customer No. field and checks agreements, item or item discount group, dates, unit of measure, minimum quantity and currency. If no price exists, the latest direct unit cost or the unit price from the item card is used. Duplicates with the same conditions and different prices give an error on activation.

Before you start

Check the status of the feature in your environment.
Decide whether you use one standard price list or several lists per customer.
Agree who may activate and change lists.
Test one customer and one item before you move the whole price base.

Discounts and invoice discount

The price list can define price, discount or both. Invoice discount is a different mechanism: a percentage is deducted from the document total if the sum of the lines exceeds a minimum. It is set up per customer with an invoice discount code and calculated with Calc. Invoice Discount, or automatically if Calc. Inv. Discount is turned on in Sales & Receivables Setup.

If an item should never get a discount, you leave the discount fields on the item empty and take the item out of all discount setups.

Remember the purchasing side too. The same price list principle exists for purchases, and you specify default lists in the setup for sales, purchases and jobs. Keep one place for each type, so nobody is in doubt about which list applies.

Next steps

Addverk builds its own apps for Business Central, but they are not on Microsoft AppSource yet. On the apps page you can see what we are working on. If you want help with the setup in standard BC, you will find the services and the open prices on the prices page.