This month, I’d been asked to write about what’s new in QuickBooks Enterprise Solutions for 2014, and believe me, these are just my favourites. A blog article just can’t do justice to these great new features. But let me get going by starting with… a story. This really happened to me.
Some years ago, a client of mine wanted to switch from another accounting software package (hint #1: super expensive; hint #2: it has two words in the name) to QuickBooks. He was very excited about it because it was simpler to use than his previous software package, which he felt was overpriced and overkill.
At the last minute, we had to abandon the project because QuickBooks could not automatically handle the volume discounts he offered his customers.
New! Advanced Pricing
I should give him a call because I have good news. I hope he’s still interested!
QuickBooks Enterprise 14.0 has a variety of new features this year, and one of them is Advanced Pricing, an optional subscription add-on for Enterprise users only. Advanced Pricing is turned on by selecting Edit > Preferences > Sales & Customers > Company Preferences > Custom Pricing > Enable Advanced Pricing.
With Advanced Pricing, QuickBooks Enterprise automatically changes the prices of items on sales forms according to one or more pricing rules you create.
Each price rule can contain one or more conditions that must be met before Enterprise changes the sales price. For example, if you want a specific group of customers (first condition: Customer Type “Franchisees”) to receive a discount, but only when they buy specific items (second condition: “Widgets,” although you could have specified many different items), you may set up a price rule with these two conditions as I did in the screenshot below. You can set up conditions based on customer, item, sales rep, and class.
Further, you can set up these price rules to be in effect for only certain dates, so that date-sensitive or temporary promotions are a snap to create. In the example below, I specified the promotion to be 50% off Widgets for franchisees for the month of December, 2018. If you have certain sales planned, you can set these promotions up for future dates, as I had done.
If the manufacturer of an item puts some markdowns into effect, you can specify a Price Rule for a specific date range for those items to be a certain percentage higher than the base cost, which will be lower during the markdown period.
Just as with Per Item Price Levels, you can specify rounding, custom ending prices (such as rounding to a price that is a certain dollar amount but ending in 95 cents), and a currency. There is even a price override function.
There’s more to Advanced Pricing than just these Price Rules. Advanced Pricing also lets you offer quantity discounts, as my client had wanted. For example, QuickBooks can charge different prices when a customer buys 10 to 19 items, 20 to 29 items, or 30 or more items. I did this by editing the item Widget and by selecting Qty Discount.
Automatically Build Nested Sub-Assemblies
Another cool feature of QuickBooks Enterprise 14.0 (and you don’t need an optional add-on for this one) is that when you have Inventory Assembly items that are made up of other Inventory Assembly items, you can tell QuickBooks Enterprise that you want to build all necessary nested subassembly items at the same time. This way, you don’t have to build each sequentially bigger assembled item before being able to build the finished product…provided that you have all the necessary components to build those nested items!
All you have to do in order to make this magic happen is to check the box next to Automatically build required subassemblies in the Build Assembly window.
Min / Max Fields
Inventory and Assembly items in QuickBooks Enterprise now have a Min and a Max field, rather than a single Reorder Point.
Edit Cost, Price, Markup or Margin
Inventory and Assembly items can now be edited by cost, price, markup percentage and margin. All you have to do is edit an item and select Edit Markup. These are very functional options on Assembly items!
Also, Assembly items can behave any way you want them to as far as their costs and prices, especially when the costs of components (included nested Subassemblies) change. You can have Assembly items follow your global preferences (see below) or edit individual Assembly items to behave differently if they are not to follow the global company preferences for the rest of the Assembly items. Just imagine the hours of work you’ll save calculating the updated cost (and resulting new price) of Assembly items that have multiple nested levels of subassemblies!
The Bottom Line
OK, this is a blog article and I can’t make this too long. But the bottom line here is that QuickBooks Enterprise 14.0 is far more functional for manufacturers this year, and together with Advanced Pricing, it can make your clients who run promotions and price rules very happy.
Excuse me…I have to look up a very old phone number and make a call.
The post What’s New in QuickBooks Enterprise Solutions for 2014 appeared first on Small Business Center | QuickBooks CA.