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Use Price Levels

Price negotiations are becoming more prevalent and you may find that you want to offer a standard discount to one or more customers in order to keep their business.

In such cases, you might find the price level feature helpful, so that you don't have to remember to include a discount item on each invoice:

Choose Lists, and then Price Level List.
Click the Price Level button, and then choose New (or press Ctrl-N).
Assign a name to the price level, such as 10% Discount.
QuickBooks Pro users can only establish Fixed % price levels, which are applied globally to all products. QuickBooks Premier and Enterprise users also have the option to create Per Item discounts, where you can selectively discount only certain items.
Specify whether to increase or decrease item prices, and optionally choose a rounding method.

Note: You can use price levels to increase or decrease prices.

Change Item Prices

Competitive or other pressures may mean that you need to globally change all of your prices at once. Fortunately, you can use the Change Item Prices feature to do so:

Choose Customers, and then Change Item Prices.
Select an Item Type from the list, and then select the items you wish to change, or click the Mark All checkbox.
Indicate a percentage or dollar amount to increase prices by. This can be based on the current price or current cost of the item. Enter a positive number to increase the price, or negative number to decrease the price.
Click the Adjust button to see the impact of your changes in the New Price column, and then click OK to make the changes permanent.

Timesaver: You can also manually fill-in the New Price column if you prefer to make targeted adjustments to selected items. This is easier than manually opening each item one at a time.

Add a Surcharge

We're fortunate that gas prices are currently far less than were they were just a few months ago. However, who knows how far they may go this summer during peak driving season.

At some point you may need to consider adding a fuel or other type of surcharge to help recover costs beyond what you've factored into your existing prices:

Choose Lists, and then Item List.
Click the Item button, and then choose New from the menu.
Choose Other Charge from the Type list.
Assign an item name, complete the description field and then enter an amount or a percentage.
Choose an account from the list, and then click OK. You may wish to create a separate account so that you can easily track the amount you earn from the surcharge.

Important: As with discounts, Other Charge items only apply to the preceding row on an invoice or sales receipt. Be sure to add a Subtotal item to your invoice if you want the surcharge to apply to multiple rows of your invoice or sales receipt.

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