Category: Acumatica

Not every customer needs a pricing solution. If you have very simple pricing, not many customers or items, and your adjustments are easy to manage then you may be all set. So, ask yourself, how complex is your pricing?

Do you?

• Manage a large list of items or customers
• Match this customer to this item or this date
• Apply discounts or a price adjustment to specific geographies
• Have many types of discounts, rebates, and promotions

Can your ERP?

• Track unlimited adjustments
• Track those adjustments back to the GL and keep them separated for processing

We find that most ERP systems cannot handle this.

We have your back

Rockton Pricing Management (RPM) is the tool to help you and your business grow. To go from manual to automated. We know it can be time-consuming and stressful to manage it all. That’s why we have your back.

This is for the:

• IT professionals who stay up late to input the new pricing changes each year
• Sales team so they know they’re giving the best possible price to their customers and getting a commission too
• Accounting so they can easily track items back to the GL, track rebates and royalties back to the vendor or customer, and not worry about over or underpaying
• Pricing managers who need to update prices on a daily, weekly, or monthly cadence and have those prices roll down to their calculations

What’s your industry?

We found a pricing revenue management solution is great for manufacturers, distributors, and wholesalers but let’s break it down even further.

• Food distributors sell by the pound, by case, by unit of measure
• Flooring and manufacturing distributors use rebates for their vendors
• Waste management companies offer discounts
• Electronics have restocking fees
• Convenience store suppliers may need to charge a brand fee by item
• Co-ops may need to change a price based on the daily market value of a component

Set It and Forget It

We’d like to think of RPM like a trusty crockpot. You put all the ingredients in and set the timer and forget about it until it’s done.

Well, with Rockton Pricing Management, you put in all the information such as pricing, adjustments, and items and then let RPM do its thing and it will send back a price when it’s done all the necessary calculations in the background.

All the manual effort, all the spreadsheets, all the time it takes to make changes are now alleviated when you put a pricing solution in the mix.

Still not sure if you need a pricing solution? Reach out to our team to learn more and schedule a personalized demo.

Many things have changed over the years. The cell phone has evolved from a singular calling device to a do pretty much everything but walk your dog device. Coffee has gone from the coffee pot to the elaborate coffee run – non-fat, extra whip, light ice, mocha frappucino anyone?

And just like those everyday essentials, ERP systems and software solutions have also made strategic evolutions as well. When’s the last time you used a CD to install software?

The same holds true for pricing revenue management. Once upon a time, we acquired a product called Omni Price, which plenty of our customers still use today. You can set up pricing contracts by customer, item, date, or unique criteria, and use filters to simplify lookups, updates, tracking, and exports but it was just for one ERP, Dynamics GP.

It’s such a great tool so why not spread the love to other ERP systems and provide more robust functionality. So, we took on the challenge and that’s when we developed Rockton Pricing Management.

It works with:

• Dynamics GP
• Acumatica
• Dynamics365 Business Central
• And more to come

You asked, we answered

One of the main reasons for this new product was customer feedback and feature requests. We’re all about helping the customer and making their work simpler & easier®. That has been our motto for over 20 years.

We weren’t able to do many of the cool requests within the existing code of the product. We thought – why not design something totally new to meet the needs of our customers. So that’s what we did.

If you have checked out some, or all, of the blogs in our pricing strategies series you learned all the ways, types, forms, advantages, and challenges pricing can have on your business.

Research, automation, and testing are important parts of an effective pricing strategy.

You may or may not need a solution

When it comes to pricing every industry is different, every business is different so you just may or may not need a pricing solution to help. We have found that there are some key industries that truly do benefit from it.

Some are:

• Distributors (Food is a big one)
• Manufacturers
• Wholesalers

Many ERPs have some type of pricing functionality built-in and that may be all you need. But if you are in one of the above-mentioned industries, or have complex pricing scenarios, or a large number of customers and/or items, or offer a wide variety of price adjustments then you may just need something more robust.

Let’s Dive In

Rockton Pricing Management (RPM), an all-in-one, flexible, multi-platform, multi-currency pricing solution. It’s the  “set it and forget it” pricing solution. You simply establish any pricing scenario one time and RPM does all the calculations and hard work behind the scenes.

Key Benefits:

• Automate dynamic pricing: Set it and forget it! You simply establish any pricing scenario one time and RPM does all the calculations and hard work behind the scenes, automatically!
• Simplify your price lists: Create, organize, filter, and search all your price lists super-fast, and in a way that actually makes sense.
• Create date-driven pricing: Assign valid date ranges to your price lists and you will automatically get the right one—on your schedule.
• Take control of rebates, commissions, restock fees, offsets and more: Track special pricing adjustments and make sure everyone gets paid. Increase overall revenue by protecting your desired margins.
• Sync with Dynamics GP, BC, or Acumatica: Rockton provides our SQL-based and web service APIs for RPM so you can connect it to your ERP system.
• Save time and money: Create more efficient, accurate systems all in one place so you can focus on growing your business instead.

Pricing management is an ongoing process of developing, setting, executing, and measuring prices for your customers. When you sell things, you need a strategy.

Whatever the pricing scenario is we will try to help and show you an easier way. We are ready to take on the challenge. Email us anytime to schedule a personalized demo.

We hope you have stuck around with us as we go through all the typical pricing strategies and scenarios you could have in your business.

Because this next one is going to be the icing on the cake. For those of you with many customers and/or a  large volume of items, you definitely need to keep reading.

You just got a new item or a new customer, and adding them to the ERP is a piece of cake, but assigning them to a pricing class or schedule now it becomes a time consuming and manual process.

This can turn into the perfect storm or a complete disaster.

You want to sell what to who?

Users may customize products by selecting attributes of the product, such as size and color. Attribute-based pricing adjusts the price based on the attributes chosen and displays the adjusted price in the quote or order.

For example, you add a new customer located in CA. You have set up an attribute for every CA customer to get a certain tax when they buy this specific soda. Because there is always this tax in CA no matter what and you want to make sure it is set up correctly in your ERP.

Setting up a customer, add the price class or schedule. Then you must go back and reconfigure how your customers relate to that NEW item.

This can turn into the perfect storm or a complete disaster.

It can be easier than you think

Well, what if you could dynamically say this group of customers get this price for this item or these customers in this geography get this price, there are just so many attributes you could assign to any unique customer class.

When looking at attributes or metadata you need something to help automate that, make it easy to set up and give that high customer service you are known for when it comes to the right price for the right customer.

Categorize into groups

One strategy to help simplify pricing is to categorize items into groups. After they are grouped, set up price filters so you’re filtering within those groups, this minimizes the number of things you must set up.  To put this into perspective, suppose you had three customer classes and you have 10 different Item Price Classes. Those 10 Item Price Classes may each have an additional cross product, which starts adding up to a whole lot of SKU’s and prices to keep track of.

Have fun with classes

Let’s start with cake mix. You may sell vanilla, chocolate and Funfetti cake mix, however they can all be in the Cake Class and be sold at the same price to your Gold Tier customers. Think of the time you save by only pricing the Cake Class, and not each individual cake flavor. By categorizing these classes into groups, you can now strategize a much more manageable pricing solution.

Customer’s ship-to address

Home Depot is your customer, but you may need to price a generator shipping to a Home Depot in Los Angeles at a higher price than the same generator going to a Home Depot in Chicago. The great thing here is you could also use a different pricing method in each of these scenarios as well.

Pricing attributes on a document

You may have a special promo code being given out at a trade show. If that code is indicated on the document, we can create a special price and apply it only to those documents that have the code included.

It’s time to have your cake and eat it too

I hope you like all our cake analogies. So, what is the icing on the cake? Rockton Pricing Management offers you the flexibility to classify your pricing. All the examples we used above; you can do with Rockton Pricing Management (RPM).

RPM allows you to pull attributes off the customer, the items, and you can do it all at the document level too.

Virtually any identifying characteristic on a customer or an item can be used to create an attribute filter in RPM.

Color, size, scent, manufacturer, model number, VIN, Lot number, ingredient, you name it! The flexible options are endless.

Conclusion

We hope this blog and all our previous blogs in this pricing strategy series showed you the options and the flexibility you can have. Not only when having a pricing strategy in place but a solution to help manage it all.

Up until now you may have thought there was no way you could handle pricing revenue management in your current ERP. Or maybe you have new strategies you can now execute. We hope we helped educate, introduce, and provided a new insight into this important part of your business.

Pricing is the strategy everyone needs but not everyone takes. We hope you take it and run with it.

Is it painful to set up new pricing schedules, schedule date-driven pricing, or track rebates and adjustments in Acumatica? Need a comprehensive payroll & HR solution that can save hours per pay period, empower employees to manage their own data, and doesn’t break the bank?

We are sharing the stage with Greenshades to show you there are pricing and payroll options for Acumatica.

Rockton will show you the ways to save money, time, and headaches when it comes to managing your pricing strategies and how Greenshades cloud-hosted, easy-to-use payroll, payroll tax, and employee services software can streamline your needs and make working with Acumatica even easier, (yes it is possible!).”

Let’s talk Pricing

When it comes to pricing there are so many ways to calculate the price of your products or services. What we’ve done is come up with a product that is able to handle more of those complex calculations and scenarios that you might come across in your business that standard ERPs like Acumatica are not able to handle.

Handling things like multiple price lists, royalties, rebates, chargebacks, anything that really can get a little cumbersome when you’re trying to put those on paper or rather into your system.

Helping you save time

You do not have to set this automation up multiple times. There’s a lot of versatility built into the product where it’s able to duplicate copy and do imports. You save time with data entry or setting up next year’s prices and then eliminating the human error aspect by having all of this set.

In a pricing engine, your data entry and your Sales Order Processing folks can just go about their day putting in those sales orders and those invoices without having to think about, what price should I be pulling for this customer.

Complex Scenarios

What we try to do is automate those complex scenarios. For example, say you are selling shirts to a customer, in California on a Tuesday, who only needs the color blue. We can set up a pricing scenario based just around that particular need. Rockton Pricing Management can handle very, very basic, all the way down to the most complex.

If you are a waste management company who has percentages of different chemicals and waste products that are making up a gallon. We can create percentages and charge different percentages for liquids versus solids, and the combination of the two.

Rockton Pricing Management (RPM) can get very granular in these pricing calculations. We can handle those crazy ones, just bring them to us, and we will figure out how to get that for you.

This is also a multi-currency pricing platform. So, if you’re shipping to Canada, The Caribbean, or Europe we’re able to handle all of those different currencies and apply those pricing scenarios in those cases.

A Giant Calculator

This is an independent pricing engine that sits outside of your ERP. It is SQL based and lives in its own environment. You can kind of think of RPM as a giant calculator.

You can pick a customer just like you normally would, your shipping address, and your items. That combination is then automatically calculated in Rockton Pricing Management and a price then pushes back over for you in Acumatica. We’re taking the data, doing the calculations, and pushing a price back. In addition to that, we are able to push back adjustments.

Looking at your distributions on a transaction can be limited as to what you can distribute by line item price. You’ve got your debit and your credit accounts and that’s about it.

With RPM you will have the ability to disburse a price and the corresponding adjustments to that price over multiple accounts. So, you’re no longer limited to just a single debit and credit. You can have unlimited debits and credits.

If you are trying to track an advertising fee, a customer incentive, a rebate to a vendor, or a commission, all of that can be done in a single line item and all of that is passed automatically without your salesperson having to make any extra journal entries or even really think about what needs to happen because it just pushes through.

Let’s talk Payroll

Payroll is one of the most critical yet most overlooked aspects of running an efficient and effective business. Flawlessly execute payroll week after week, and it goes unnoticed. Make a small error, however, the response is immediate and vocal. Add increasingly complex regulatory pressures – particularly for multi-state employers – and the job of the payroll professional is more challenging than ever. You need a partner who can both simplify the complex and transform an obstacle into an opportunity.

Greenshades HCM empowers you to keep payroll in-house, offering greater control, lower costs, and all the benefits of a cloud-based platform, including constant updates and enhancements. ​

We can simplify the payroll process for users, help maintain compliance, encourage employee self-service, and really get folks excited about the payroll and HR possibilities.

Improve Visibility

• “At-a-Glance” Payroll Dashboard​
• Simplified Views of Historical ​
• Pay Runs with One-Click Access​
• Front Page Awareness of Future Pay Runs

Comply with Confidence

• Automated assignment of Federal, State, Local Taxes​
• Management of Multiple Jurisdictions and Reciprocity​
• Execution of Flawless Returns​
• Proactive Notifications of Filing and Payment Deadlines

Empower your Employees

• Powerful Employee Portal Component​
• Access Pay Stubs, PTO Balances, Benefits Programs, Notes, Notifications​
• Self-Service of Profile Information, Direct Deposit, Benefits​
• Advanced Time Entry and Attendance​

Move From “To-Do” to “All Done”​

• Year-end processing is historically a stressful time​
• Simple step-by-step process​
• Turnkey year-end form processing services​

​We are combining the strengths of an in-house payroll solution and a cloud-based platform. So, you can maintain a higher level of control, a higher level of flexibility at a lower cost, and an outsource solution while still benefiting from a platform that can be managed anywhere. This also comes with the automatic updates and enhancements that you expect with a hosted solution.

Payroll is one of the core critical processes. A business needs to be both accurate and efficient. And, of course, it needs to be compliant as well. Unfortunately, it is more and more difficult to hit all those targets. Which is one of the drivers for a payroll and HR platform.

Conclusion

Companies are increasingly assessing their needs as they consider making that move to a cloud-based platform like Acumatica. Rockton and Greenshades can help support your current pricing and payroll challenges.

We do understand that every company is going to be unique, as far as their own processes, as far as their own methods. So, we want to make sure that, you know, we are here to discuss those with you and see how we can help with any pricing scenario or payroll and HR process.

Feel free to check out the Pricing & Payroll webinar recording to learn more and see these solutions in action.

Welcome to our price strategies video series. In this series, we are going to take you on a virtual journey and show you the ways to save money, time, and headaches when it comes to managing your pricing strategies.

Our first video was all about rebates, next we talked about dynamic pricing, and now we are going to dive into date-driven pricing.

How often do you change your prices? Pricing changes can happen monthly, bi-annually, annually.  Do you have date-driven promos? This pricing strategy is most likely a part of your business because it is inevitable that pricing needs to be updated at some point.

 

Importance of Date-Driven Pricing

Ready to make some pricing changes and it is time to update your ERP, so what do you do?????

• Maybe it is a time consuming, manual process of uploading spreadsheets and countless hours of updating the old pricing to the new pricing.
• Maybe you have hundreds of customers and hundreds of items and when there is new pricing or you want to do a 30-day promotion there is just no easy way to tell the system of those changes.
• Maybe your IT staff has to be up late the night of the 31st updating the system with the latest pricing changes so the next day it is ready to go.

It is important to have date-driven pricing to keep with up with the changes in your industry, with certain products or customers, and in making a profit.

No pricing changes could lead to no momentum, no growth, and no profit.

Why it is hard in an ERP

Most ERP systems are not always designed to handle your pricing changes based on date.

In typical ERPs, you can at least create price levels and assign them to customers, so they get the needed pricing. When you enter transactions, the price level will usually default and pull the price for them. They can always change it, but it is just a simple way to pull in the price.

Date-driven pricing might be an option in other ERPs but there are limitations.

Maybe you want to offer a specific customer a special price on a group of items for a set amount of time per contract.

OR

When it comes to special sales – such as a holiday promotion that may only last a day or two, a monthly flash sale or even just putting in your next year’s prices in advance.

Many pricing strategies can be a manual, time-consuming process.

Date-Driven Pricing Simplified

What if you never had to worry about pricing by date again? You can even set it up days in advance or months or even years in advance. Rockton Pricing Management (RPM) does all the work in the background (just tell it the date range) and it will pull in the correct price based on that date. This also takes the guesswork out of data entry knowing that you are not providing sale prices once a promotion or sale has expired. RPM will automatically turn off the price once it hits the expiration date.

RPM is the engine and does all the calculations and hard work behind the scenes. Automatically!

Whether you have Dynamics GP, Business Central, or Acumatica; RPM has you covered.

Conclusion

Date-driven pricing is a non-negotiable for any business. It just ends up being a question of whether you want to do it manually or have it automated.

Good price management and strategies can promote your distribution business to the next level. If you are ready to price in a strategic way it is important to have a system in place to handle all types of pricing scenarios.

Lastly, you probably keep a close eye on the competition and adjust your prices accordingly. But whatever changes you want to make, RPM is there for you.

Welcome to our price strategies video series. We are taking you on a virtual journey. You will learn ways to save money, time, and headaches when it comes to managing your pricing strategies.

Our first video was all about rebates, now we are going to walk through our second topic, Dynamic Pricing.

Dynamic pricing models vary in complexity, from simple, rules-based pricing updated periodically to sophisticated, real-time models. It can be based on certain customers, certain quantities, or whether the shirt is green or blue. The possibilities are endless.

Yes, we are opening that can of worms. So, why have Dynamic Pricing? What is its purpose? Should you incorporate it into your pricing strategy? Let’s dive into those questions and more.

Importance of Dynamic Pricing

Dynamic pricing is a strategy that involves setting flexible prices for goods or services based on real-time demand. With COVID-19 and the influx of supply and demand, this strategy is now more important than ever.

Dynamic pricing leads to growth in sales and can also generate profitable revenue. It is a real-time pricing technique that helps in setting a flexible cost of the product or service you offer. The importance of dynamic pricing is that it allows for a real-time change in what you offer or sell based on certain criteria.

Advantages and Disadvantages

Dynamic pricing can be time-consuming, but it also can be beneficial and successful if implemented correctly.

Advantages include:

• Increased sales
• Keeps you competitive
• Learn more about your customers
• Better inventory management
• Allows pricing to reflect demand

Disadvantages include:

• Customers are not a fan of it
• Loss of sales if not implemented properly
• Not applicable everywhere – works better in certain fields and industries than the others

Why Dynamic Pricing

Because static pricing isn’t a strategy. Using the mix of Cost Plus % based on customer loyalty can return a much higher margin than simply a static Cost Plus price on an item.

Consider charging those excellent customers a little less of a markup percentage on their top items, and then raise the markup on lesser purchased items. This option isn’t possible with a static Cost Plus pricing methodology, but you can easily see how those dollars quickly add up to profits. Using a dynamic pricing strategy can give you greater control over the overall margin you receive across your entire product line and customer base.

It is also important because it determines how much profit you will make. Your challenge is setting the right price for your products and ensuring that your pricing strategy doesn’t turn customers away.

Dynamic Pricing Simplified

What if you never had to worry about which Price Level you should use on a transaction? With Rockton Pricing Management (RPM) you simply establish any pricing scenario one time and RPM does all the calculations and hard work behind the scenes. Automatically!

Conclusion

Dynamic pricing is an essential strategy and can be successful. The main takeaway is dynamic pricing works well only if implemented properly.

If you are feeling left behind don’t worry. The good news is that few companies have truly gotten it right so far. Research shows that only 18% of B2B company’s price dynamically.

Now is the time to take charge and put a strategy in place, if it makes sense for your industry. Pricing is a discipline that continues to improve over time; therefore, getting there first can deliver significant and sustained benefits over the competition. Given the tangible nature of the payoff, wasted time is wasted profit. The payback can be immediate and ongoing, assuming you have a plan, strategy, and can execute it quickly and effectively.