1. Price Levels
Overview| August 2017

2. Overview
Every General Manager of every Branch must maintain pricing. This is most easily accomplished by using Price Levels.
Typically levels should be assigned for your largest, or most important, management companies so that all of the properties managed by that company are billed the same price for the same item.
For example, if Bell Partners is set up on level 5, then all of the properties that are managed by them will have the level 5 price for any items that are sold to the customer.
In this brief demonstration, I will walk through an example of a management company that is not on Price Levels. Then I will show that same management company on a Price Level.
The goal is to illustrate not only the ease of updating for a price change and time saved by the Office, but more accurate control and visibility for the General Manager and Account Manager as well.

3. What’s the Benefit? General Manager Account Manager
Ease and Control of Pricing Strategy for the Branch
More visibility of Customer Pricing
Time saving as less time will be necessary to maintain pricing
Better customer invoicing due to less errors
Simplicity as no longer need to remember exact price or special pricing for every item
Time saving as will not need to review every customer, simply review the level

4. Let’s Compare Customer not on Level Pricing
As everything for this customer has been entered as Special Pricing, anytime there is a Price Change every item will need to be reviewed/updated. This is time consuming when you need to do this for every customer.

5. Let’s Compare Customer on Level Pricing
When on a Level, there is much less to update, therefore much less time is necessary to make the change. Less items to change also means less chance for error.
So, how do you get from the first example to the second…

6. How to get there
Assign the Customer to a Price Level on the Matrix or assign an existing Price Level if one closely matches
Note: We will review how to get started and use a Price Matrix in the next lesson
In our example, our Customer is Jonathan Geck.
Once we compare the Prices for Jonathan Geck to existing levels, we see that Level 3 is a close match with few exceptions.
In this case, we would assign this Customer to Level 3. Then the exceptions would be Special Pricing.
In the first example all pricing for this customer was Special Pricing. Now, only the exceptions to Level 3 would be entered as Special Pricing

7. How is this saving me time?
When a Price Change is received, the Price Group and Special Pricing must be updated in the system.
When the customer is on a Level, the Price Group is updated, not individual customers. Thus, one price group update will update all customers that group is assigned to.
In our example, our customer uses Initiator hard surface. Since we have a Price Group “INIT12” which all Armstrong Initiator Vinyl falls under, we would simply update the Level Pricing here. That is then carried through to all customers who have this Price Group assigned. Thus, we updated in one place versus updating each individual customer who purchases this product.
Whereas Special Pricing must be updated for each individual customer.

8. The Result
Now that we’ve updated the Price Levels in our Price Groups, we need only update any Special Pricing for each customer.
Run OP-3-51 in varnet for the Management Company to ensure there is no Special Pricing that shouldn't be there.
In our example, as the majority of the previous Special Pricing is now addressed on a Level, the old special pricing is removed.
Update any remaining Special Pricing or determine if the customer may begin using the Level Pricing for that item (in which case special pricing would be removed).

9. “The great dividing line between success and failure can be expressed in five words: I did not have time.” — Franklin Field
Yes, if you are not currently using Price Levels, or not using them effectively, it will take a bit of time to get set up.
Yes, if you spend this time now, it WILL save you much more time later.
Yes, there is help and guidance available.

10. Questions?
For guidance to begin using a Pricing Matrix to set up and maintain Price Groups and Levels for your Branch, please refer to the instructional video entitled: Getting Started – Price Matrix.
For general questions regarding Price Levels or Groups, please reach out to your Regional Operations Coordinator.