WARNING !!-Inventory Price levels are misleading. Check your records!!

[Marka]

We recently found a large problem with Peachtree and now have to find out how much goods we sold at below price we should have.

If you use price levels and using v9 please be aware that changes to your price level thru maintain inventory item does not reflect back to your price levels 2, 3, 4 etc. if your price levels 2, 3, 4 etc are based on calculations. If you are in the screen multiple price levels and change Price Level 1 and your other price levels are based on calculation of price level 1 unless you happen to notice the warning and do not recalculate your price levels peachtree does not make this change automatically. If the original price entered for price level 1 was $100 and price level 2 is based on a calculation of 5% discount then price level 2 will show $95.00. If you then realize either at that time or later that your original price level should have been $125 even do to a price increase passed to your customers and you change price level 1 to $125.00 Peachtree will allow you to exit the screen without updating the other price levels even though it is set at discount based on calculation. There is a warning that is not very obvious and unless you happen to notice it you will then be selling you now priced $125 (less 5%) at $95.00 each instead of $118.75. Oh, but there is more. If you change the price in the inventory maintainance screen from the original $100 and then click save on the inventory maint screen there is NO WARNING AT ALL THAT YOU NEED TO RECALCULATE YOUR PRICING. You have now lost money on every sale. Unless the error is so gross that you happen to notice it you will never know. What i don't understand is if the system is set at calculation of price level 1 then why does it ask if you want to recalculate you pricing when of course that is what you wanted to start with. Then to boot, if you change your price level 1 in the inventory maint screen it DOES NOT REFLECT TO THE OTHER PRICE LEVELS AND DOES NOT WARN YOU IN ANY WAY.

I would check your prices. This would not apply to companies that are not using different pricing levels.

Mark

[Marka]

TO ANYONE THAT USES PRICE LEVELS !!

I bumped this thread up to the top by replying to my own thread. I did not see any replies which concerned me greatly.

This is a serious situation and one that you should not take lightly if you do in fact use Price Levels. Luckly when we caught this mistake we had not sold many of the items that reflected incorrect pricing. I am sure many of you that use Price Levels may not be aware of this BUG in Peachtree. How Peachtree can warn you so insugnificantly and if you blink you will miss it is beyond me. If you set price levels 2, 3 4 etc as a calculation off of Price Level 1 then why in the world would you have to tell Peachtree each time, yes, "Recalculate". This is crazy. And to boot, if you change a price in Price level 1 in inventory maintainace screen there is NO WARNING that you need to recalcuate your prices for the other pricing levels.

You can actually loose money with this bug.

Mark

[Robert Walraven]

Marka,

We have had several customers tell us that Peachtree's price changing capability is simply not adequate for their business. For example, how would you do a seasonal adjustment with the functionality they provide?

In about a week we will be releasing a $99 add-on that works like this: the price levels for items you select are read into an Excel spreadsheet at the click of a button. You define your own factors and formulas to compute new prices - whatever is appropriate for your business. Another click of a button writes the new price levels you have determined to Peachtree and saves all the factors and formulas you defined so you can pull them up again the next time you need to do price changes. It's a very simple tool to use but gives you complete control over changes in the price levels.

Bob
Architect of PawCom

[Marka]

Bob,

We would not have a use for such an add-on. But it does sound interesting.

My biggest concern was that as we almost suffered fait in errors for Peachtree's pricing level I wanted to warn anyone else that uses price levels to be aware that peachtreee does not warn sufficiently enough that there are errors in the pricing levels - especially if you change the pricing level 1 in the inventory master file screen. You would have to go to every item number in the price level master screen to see if all calculations are correct. In my case I wrote a crystal report to do the comparison for me. Crystal will only print the price level prices that are not consistant with price level one and the calculations you have set. This way I can review all 300 items we have within minutes.

The other job i was at had Macola and it allowed you to set prices specifically at customer level. Meaning every customer could have a different price than any other customer for every item we had. Peachtree only allows you to share the same prices with every customer.

Just one more limitation of peachtree's.

Mark