Modify Material, Labor rate & Machine rate formulas within a Product

Haylee Benton Updated by Haylee Benton

Create unique formulas for Materials, Labor rates & Machine rates within a Product!

We have created a powerful addition to Pricing Templates, which is the ability to override the default formula for a Material, Labor rate or Machine rate in your pricing templates and formulas to control their pricing calculations.

That's a mouthful! What does that mean???

Let's start with a scenario

If you have used "pricing template" you are familiar with these two sections, 

  • Items to be charged 
  • Required Pricing Options

In both of these sections, when you add a line item to a transaction; you can choose a material/labor/machine rate and it would use the "Formula" that was set on that individual Material/Labor/Machine rate.  

But there was a limitation:

What if you want to manipulate the "formula" on material, labor or machine rates within the Pricing Template?  

Please follow carefully... here is an example to explain...

Let's say you have a material "MaterialX" and you set that material to use the formula "Area" in the material definition.  When you use this material in Items to be charged or Required Pricing Options, there was not a way to ignore the default formula "Area" and it would only use the Item Formula in the Pricing Template.  Until now, the only way  was to set the default formula on that Material to "None" and then it would use the Item Formula you select for that material in the Pricing Template.  But what if you want to use this same material in another Pricing Template with a formula of "Area"?Since it is set to None, you cannot use "Area" for your Template.  This limited the way you could use the same Material in different Templates.

So how did we fix this limitation?

There is a different fix in each of the two sections in Pricing template... below will explain how it can be modified in each.

Start by clicking Company Name >> POS settings >> $ Pricing >> Products

Edit items in the Require Pricing Options or Items to be Charged sections

OLD FORMULA INTERFACE

UPDATED FORMULA INTERFACE

How it works:

Items to be charged section:

In "Items to be Charged" you can only choose a specific material, labor or machine rate.  When you add that Material/Labor/Machine rate, the default formula is visible in the pricing template definition.  This new formula field will copy from the default Material/Labor/Machine rate.  If you want to change this to something else then it will only affect this particular Pricing Template.  You can select whatever formula you want it to be.  If you want to do this then set the Formula field to None and then write your own formula in "Item Formula" field.  This change will only affect this particular Pricing Template and you can still use the default formula on that Material/Labor/Machine rate in other Pricing templates.

So referring back to our example - 'MaterialX" with a default formula - Area can be set to what it was...or...any other possible one ...or... even None to write a specific formula.

Required Pricing Options section:

Since you can have a bunch of possible Materials/Labors/Machine rates, and each of those can have different "Formulas" you cannot set to one formula in the Formula section.  The "Formula" section will be set to blank, meaning it will use whatever is designed for that Material/Labor/Machine rate.  Now let's say you want to use your own formula for these options... then set that Formula to None and write your own Item Formula.  This will then ignore the existing default formulas on those materials/labor/machine rates. This new Item formula will be specific to this pricing template.

I know it might be a bit overwhelming but just try it out and you will see the power of this addition, especially those who write custom formulas to do pricing. It is very, very powerful.

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