“When we need to adjust any price in any list, it is getting confusing due to the number of lists.”
They would like to delete the price lists that have expired instead of keep them around… I know I would use grid filters to filter active and inactive price lists by their end date, but that’s me. I would like to see the history of how we priced things in price list form (yes I know we could go to the invoice and ultimately should for pricing history).
They state that deleting them would also help them naming the new lists because they would like to use the same PK (ListCode) over and over. I would argue they can re-use the same list if that’s what they really want.
Either way, y’all can see my thoughts are all over the place and I was looking for anyone with a succinct best business practice for creating and retiring lists- something that has worked well for their company… any takers?
Thanks in advance for any thoughts or time spent thinking about this, regardless of whether you reply or not.
EDIT: pretty sure you can’t delete price lists that are on quotes or orders.
EDIT 2: you can delete a price list as long as you unlink it from the customer… Which is interesting… That would mean you could create it again under the same name. Which I guess is the same as changing an already existing one
Don’t delete price lists. What happens if you go back into an order that previously referenced that price list, and make a change (like quantity or something), then it will pull $0 or whatever price you have on the part master, because the price list is gone. But as you point out, there is effectively no difference between updating a price list and deleting it and recreating it with the same code, as long as you use the same start date for the price list. If you recreate it with a later start date, now it no longer applies to the previously created orders, leaving those orders without a price list to reference.
Price list management in Epicor is really horrible. If you just update the existing price lists, its a little more manageable in terms of the number of price lists, but, you risk applying updated pricing unintentionally (because new price will be pulled into old order if you change something on that order). Nor can you intentionally bulk-update existing orders in the system when you load new pricing even if you want to. And you can’t track the history of what the price was in previous time periods. Even if you put a change log on it, you can’t report on it.
But if you keep adding new price lists, they are impossible to manage because you only get 8 characters for the list code which is absurdly insufficient for any kind of meaningful naming convention. In addition, the built-in screens don’t give you the ability to do any kind of bulk updating. For example, if you could select a group of price lists, and automatically copy all of them with new effective dates, while maintaining the cust/group associations, and simultaneously expiring the previous price lists, that would go a long way towards making it more manageable, but Epicor doesn’t provide a way to do any of that. And even if you build it yourself, its quickly going to get out of control with the number of records depending on if you are doing individual customer pricing and how frequently you update your pricing. I don’t have a good solution for this and thinking about building something from scratch that would work better.
Thank you and I am glad to know we are not the only one struggling with it. Your thoughts are my thoughts. The DMT game is fun every year or whenever the mass price changes happen. Another complexity I probably need to pay a litttttle more attention to is that we have the same part on multiple price lists assigned to the same customer… which you could argue is the fault of whomever set it up, but if they do want to continue doing it then the order in which the price lists are listed on the customer starts to come into play and therefore I may need to watch the DMT and the order that they are added to the customer.
In short, glad I am not the only one struggling and feeling like there’s not much more we can do to make it any easier. It just is what it is.
I keep hoping for somebody else to come along with an amazing solution that I can copy, but time is running out, I may really be forced to do something about this soon and then I can share with you lol.
In terms of best practice. I always recommend trying to use Customer Groups. Find it’s easier to update and manage the one group record rather than updating EVERY customer record.
That only works if you have standard pricing or at least bands of standard pricing. If every customer gets a unique assortment with unique pricing then its simply not an option.
Price lists are so much fun
We do a mass update to our prices twice a year, we have 4 tiers of pricing example
Retail, Gold Silver Bronze. these are assigned to the customer. When an update occurs I DMT a copy of the current retail into a new pricelist labeled with year 23-Retail, then delete all lines out of Retail and DMT into that the new prices. This way we have a history of changes, the number 1 slot assigned to the customer doesn’t change as the price list code is the same. Sometimes we allow the previous year price list to be active for a small crossover period and I assign that to the customer in slot 2 via DMT.
I’m curious if anybody has used other software besides Epicor that DOES manage price lists well. I would love to steal some ideas from a product design that got it right.
We set the screen to sort by description the standard lists stay at the top due to the description being 01 - Retail, 02- Gold etc after that the archived lists are all labeled with the year at the beginning so they run in order 2019 Harvest Retail etc.
As we only do a major change twice a year upkeep is not too bad, it helps that it is kept to the finance team to manage and is done using DMT.
Our bigger issue is pulling cost data to determine what the prices should be set at we do standard parts with no issue but also many Kits that are all set to parent pricing. Calculating what the price of the Kit should be is proving problematic due to some BOMs including phantoms which do not explode in a BAQ, my BAQ skills are still at junior level I feel it can be done I’m just not there yet.
