Setting Up Pricing Schemes
A pricing scheme is how the same item carries more than one standard price — one for walk-in retail, one for members, one for wholesale — without anybody typing a price on a document. This page sets one up and, more importantly, explains which scheme a given line will use, because that is where the surprises live.
Budget twenty minutes for the first scheme. Copying prices into a second one takes two.
Meet GadgetSphere
GadgetSphere Sdn Bhd prices three ways: Retail in the 22 branches, Member for its loyalty customers, and Wholesale for the distribution company’s corporate clients. Same 5,200 items, three price lists.
Pricing schemes, price books, and which one you want
Both change the price on a line, and they are not the same tool.
| Pricing scheme | Price book | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | A standard price list — this item costs this much in this scheme | A set of conditional rules — if the customer, the item and the date look like this, adjust the price |
| Where the number lives | On the item, per scheme | In the price set’s treatment |
| Good for | Retail vs member vs wholesale price lists | Promotions, volume tiers, customer-specific discounts |
| Guide | This page | Setting up a price book |
They work together. A line starts at its pricing-scheme price and a matching price set can then discount it. A price set can even be tied to a scheme — a treatment whose price source is a pricing scheme only applies to lines already on that scheme.
If you just want three standard price lists, you want pricing schemes and nothing else.
Step 1: Create the schemes
Doc Item Maintenance > Pricing Schemes > Create
Three fields: the code, which is generated for you; the name, which is required; and a description.
Create Retail, Member and Wholesale. Name them for what they are, because the name is what everybody will see in a dropdown.
The scheme itself holds no prices. It is a column heading.
Step 2: Put the prices in
Doc Item Maintenance > Items > (an item) > Pricing Scheme tab
Each item has a row per scheme. For the flagship smartphone: RM 4,299 retail, RM 4,099 member, RM 3,950 wholesale.
For 5,200 items you do not do this one at a time. Three tools:
- Import Item takes a CSV that includes pricing.
- Export Item exports the current pricing so you can edit it and bring it back — export, edit, re-import is the safe way to make a bulk change.
- Item Price Change applies a bulk price change across many items.
Copying one scheme from another
Pricing Schemes > (a scheme) > Copy tab
This is the fastest way to create the second and third scheme: duplicate every item price from another scheme, optionally with an amendment. Build Retail properly, then copy it into Member with a reduction, and into Wholesale with a bigger one. Then correct the handful of items where the rule does not hold.
A price for one specific customer
Items > (an item) > Entity Pricing tab, or Entity Pricing Import for many at once. This is a price for one customer or supplier on one item, outside the scheme structure entirely. Use it sparingly — a dozen entity prices is maintainable, a thousand is not.
Step 3: Say which scheme each applet sells at
This is the step that decides what actually happens, and there is more than one place it is decided.
Every selling applet has a default. In Sales Invoice, Sales Order, Sales Quotation and POS: Settings > Default Selection > Default Pricing Scheme. That is the scheme used when a line is added.
POS has two more layers on top of that:
- Branch Settings > Pricing Scheme, with a priority — so one branch can sell at a different scheme from the rest.
- Role ↔ Pricing Scheme Link — which decides which scheme a role sells at. This is the one that catches people: two cashiers at the same counter, on the same till, can be selling at different prices because they hold different roles.
So when somebody asks why a price came out differently from what they expected, check in this order: the role link, then the branch setting, then the applet default, then whether a price book discounted it afterwards.
Step 4: Keep them in step
The commonest failure with pricing schemes is not that they are wrong on day one. It is that Retail gets updated for six months and Member does not, and the gap between them drifts into nonsense.
Pick a rhythm — monthly, or whenever Retail changes in bulk — and use Export Item to compare the schemes side by side in a spreadsheet. It is the only view that shows them all at once.
What success looks like
Three minutes:
- Open an item’s Pricing Scheme tab. All three schemes have a price, and the relationship between them is the one you intended.
- Raise a draft sales invoice line for that item. The unit price is the scheme your applet’s Default Selection names.
- Ask a colleague on a different role to do the same thing on POS. If they get a different price, the Role ↔ Pricing Scheme Link is why — and you now know where to look.
Discard both drafts.
Common mistakes
| What goes wrong | What you see | The fix |
|---|---|---|
| Expecting the scheme itself to hold prices | An empty scheme that does nothing | Prices live on the item, per scheme |
| No Default Pricing Scheme set on the applet | Lines come in with no price, or the wrong one | Set it in that applet’s Default Selection, then reload |
| Two users getting different prices on the same till | Looks like a bug | The Role ↔ Pricing Scheme Link in POS decides per role |
| One branch pricing differently and nobody knows why | Looks like a bug | POS Branch Settings › Pricing Scheme, with its priority |
| Building the second scheme item by item | Days of work | Use the scheme’s Copy tab, with an amendment |
| Schemes drifting apart over months | Member price higher than retail on some items | Export all schemes periodically and compare |
| Using entity pricing for everything | Thousands of one-off prices nobody can audit | Use schemes for price lists and price books for conditional discounts; keep entity pricing for genuine exceptions |