Creating price books and managing product pricing

Price books can be used to hold different product prices for various customers. Price books can be found in the Products section of Breww and can be very useful when updating pricing in bulk for customers or applying complicated discounts to products. Price books can be assigned to invoices, customers, customer types or customer groups. Breww will pre-populate the invoice’s pricing with the customer’s price book and if they do not have one then the Default price book in SettingsOrder/Invoice settings will be used.

Types of price book

There are two types of price book in Breww

1. Base price books

Every pricing structure starts with a base price book. A base price book must have a specific price set for every active product.
You can have multiple base price books for different pricing lines, such as your trade and retail pricing.

2. Derived price books

Any pricing variations from your bases are done by creating a derived price book, and selecting your base as a parent price book.
Your new price book will start by inheriting all its prices from the parent price book. You can then apply rules or set explicit prices to override the parent’s prices.
When creating/editing a derived price book, you can toggle whether the parent’s rules (if applicable) should be applied first or to simply bring forward the unmodified base price.

Applying rules

There are two types of rule you can add to a price book; simple discounts and quantity-based discounts. Both rule types allow you to specify which products the rule should affect, depending on product type, container type or product tag.

The base price to apply the rule is the price of the product in the parent price book, assuming it is explicit set. If the parent price book is also a derived price book, then please see the FAQ Can I set a non-base (derived) price book as a parent? below for an explanation of the how the base price will be determined for the rule application.

1. Simple discounts

Using a simple discount rule, you can apply a fixed discount (or addition) to your prices.

2. Quantity-based discounts

Using a Quantity-based discount rule, you can apply a variable discount (or addition) to your prices.

You can set multiple rules on a single price book. The first rule in the list that affects the product in question will be applied to the product’s price. You can alter the order of your rule list using the button highlighted below. This allows you to set up complicated structures, like the one below, where if the product isn’t matched by the first two rules, the final rule will apply.

Setting explicit prices

To set an explicit price, click the button indicated in the screenshot below.
This will override the current price and any rules in the price book that affect the product. The price entered will be the final price. To remove the explicitly set price, click the ‘Remove’ button. The price will then be redetermined, accounting for any rules that may now affect it.

Assinging price books

You can assign price books to customer types, customer groups and directly to customer accounts.

:toolbox: Just getting started with Breww ? If you are just getting started with Breww and you are yet to import your customers, you will be able to assign your price books directly to customers on your customer import, and therefore you can skip this step! However, you could choose not to assign a price book directly to customer accounts when using the importer and instead return to this guide following your import and apply them to either a customer type, group or directly to a customer. Click here to visit the next guide, or Click here to return to the Getting started guide.

Assigning a price book to a customer type

You can assign a price book to a customer type by heading to CustomersSettings & toolsCustomer types and selecting the edit pencil on a customer type.

Assigning a price book to a customer group

To assign a price book to a customer group, then head to CustomersViewCustomer groups and select the edit pencil on a customer group.

Assigning a price book directly to a customer

You can assign a price book directly to a customer by heading to Customers and selecting to view a customer account. If you then select Edit you will be able to select the price book from the drop-down menu under Customer details.


FAQs

Can I set a non-base (derived) price book as a parent?

Yes, any price book can be set as a parent. A price book tree always starts with a base price book, to ensure that a price can always be inherited if not set directly, but you can have any number of derived price books.

If you go to the main price books page in Breww, you’ll see a list of your price books, followed by a “flowchart” showing which price books are the parent to which other price books. This shows a bit like this:

Screenshot 2022-10-31 at 17.04.25

Which price book will be used on a customer’s order?

Breww will use the “most specific” option that it can for the price book. For example:

  1. If there is a price book set on the Customer, this will be used.
  2. If not, Breww will check the Customer Group for a price book to use.
  3. If one is still not found, Breww will check the Customer Type for a price book to use.
  4. Finally, Breww will use the default price book on your account.

Can I add an increase in price as a rule on a derived price book?

Yes, firstly, when setting up a derived price book, you can choose to hide discounts on invoices, meaning the customer won’t see this price increase represented on their invoice.
Screenshot 2023-10-10 at 10.07.15
You can also edit this later by selecting Actions & ToolsEdit basic details when on the price book. You can then add a simple rule with a minus discount to increase the price; for example, -10 would increase the price by 10%.

Is there a way to do volume based deals on a price book where you get an item ‘Free’ eg buy 9 Firkins & get 1 free? Rather than a % saving?

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Edit - We have since launched a price books update where this is possible on a single order basis.

This isn’t really possible right now, but we have a big project on improving price books that’s in progress at the moment.

Are you looking to apply this on a single order, or as more of a loyalty discount that accumulates a free firkin over time? For example, a customer buys 3 today, 2 next week, and 4 the following week, and should they get their next one free?

Hi

I think ideally it would be good to be able to offer both options, but I think the single order one would be more of a priority.

The ‘loyalty discounts’ aspect is also something to explore but at least from our perspective it is not as common.

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This is a good idea, we used bulk 7+1 deals with loyal customers and think Breww should be able to have a system to keep track of customers deal progress and to alert Sales People when the customer is due a free cask/keg

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2 posts were split to a new topic: Buy X get one free deal across multiple orders

Hello, it looks like you’ve been doing some work on price books, unfortunately one of the changes (intentional or not) causes us a problem - customers with percentage discount price books only see the discounted price, invoices don’t show the list price plus the discount, therefore it’s not obvious they are receiving a discount. Is there a tick box or something I might have missed to reinstate this?
Thanks.

Hi Gemma,

Thanks for getting in touch. You’re right we’ve made some huge improvements to price books (and you’ve beaten the launch announcement - that’s coming later today).

This is one niggle, that we’re working on fixing right now, as the discount should be showing on the invoice (there are no settings to change). As you’ve probably noticed, the price itself is correct, it’s just not showing that a discount was applied to get to this price.

I’ll drop you an update here when this is resolved.

Thanks for your patience. This issue with the discounts not showing has been resolved now.

If there are any added this morning that are not showing the discount, you can remove the line from the order and add it again so that it picks up the display of the discount. Apologies for the hassle this has caused.

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Hi Luke,

We have noticed the Price Books update too but it gives us a little bit of a headache aswell.

We used to be able to edit each different price book for a product from the product page under pricing. Now, instead of being an edit price button, that button now links to the whole price book, meaning you have to search for the product again to then edit the price. This makes editing prices for products really faffy instead of how easy it used to be.

Is this a deliberate change?

Cheers
Justin

Hi Justin,

This was a deliberate change, as with the new price books being so much more powerful than the old ones with the new rule structure, we didn’t expect that so many prices would be being set manually. (I appreciate we’ve been slow off the mark with the updated help guide here too, sorry!)

On reflection, it would be helpful to allow manually setting prices from this tab anyway, so we’ll look to get this functionality added back in shortly. We’ll follow up here when this is in place.

We’re delighted with this huge leap forward in terms of price book functionality and thanks for your patience while we iron out the final usability issues like this.

Thanks Luke, I’ll keep an eye out for your message here for when that function returns, and also for your announcement on price books to delve into the new features properly.

Cheers
Justin

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Just so everyone knows, the first post in this thread has now been updated with the new information for the new price books functionality in Breww.

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6 posts were split to a new topic: How can I remove products from a price book?

@james-dyer this functionality should be back in the Pricing tab of a product now :smile: Let us know if you have any suggestions for further improvements.

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A post was split to a new topic: Update price book prices in bulk

Do derived prices automatically update when their parent (base) price book is updated?
Thanks,
Lewis.

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Yes, they will. Inherited prices will update and the base price used by rules in the child price book will update as well. The only type of price that won’t update is if you have set an explicit price in the child price book.

You can identify an explicitly set price as it will be in the ‘Prices’, not the ‘Inherited prices’ section; it won’t have a rule and you can immediately type a new one/remove it.

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Doing work on pricing just now, can you tell…

My latest question - is there a way that when a customer’s pricing is a discounted one, it is shown as an explicit price on the invoice?

Example: Queen’s Head’s price book says they get 20% off “List price” so their invoice says–

1 x Cask IPA @ £100
less 20% discount = -£20
Total net = £80

Can we have the invoice just showing the net price as £80?

Why? To avoid the customer thinking they are not getting a large enough discount.

Thanks again,
Lewis.

Currently, the only way this would be possible would be to edit your invoice PDF template HTML to not show the discount column and only the post-discount price.

If you’re not confident doing this (as it does require some HTML knowledge), you could post a feature request to hide discounts on the invoice PDF.

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