Are you a current user of DEAR systems? This system is great for businesses to run their operations as it provides a whole host of functions that streamline processes and reduces your manual administration. In this blog we’re going to look at how you can use DEAR to manage your customer pricing.
Starting with your customer data import, there are two standard ways we manage custom pricing which is Price Tier and Discount. The most used format in DEAR that many of our customers use is Price Tiers – the Discount Rule is less common, but it does allow the user to apply a discount to every single sale that a customer makes by standard.
Managing customers through pricing tiers
Typically, within DEAR we see a variety of Price Tiers, like trade or regular retail price, also known as RRP, but the system actually allows you to have up to 10 different tiers. This will allow you to set standard prices for each customer – so you can have 10 different customer tiers and then each of these allocated tiers will get a different price for products. How this could look is as follows:
- Customer Tier 1 could receive the RRP
- Customer Tier 2 could receive the trade price
- Customer Tier 3 could receive the wholesale price
This is the first and most basic way to set up custom pricing for customers, but this isn’t the most customised method that’s available through the DEAR system. You can change your tier names for more customisation within the general settings of the system.
Managing customers through discounts
Managing customers by discounts is less commonly used and this method allows you to use a flat discount rule to the customer – anytime the customer purchases, the discount will eb automatically added to the system. The system is flexible enough where you can also overwrite or even delete the discount where required, for example if you want to sell products at sale level. This option is a great way to have reoccurring rules in place for loyal or longstanding customers, without you needing to manually add a discount every time.
Managing customers with custom pricing
The final method we use within custom pricing is the actual custom prices for each customers. Using an import of data, you can select a product, select the customer and tie a price to the two fields, for example Customer 1 may be able to purchase Product X for £5 and Customer 2 will be able to purchase the same product but for £10. Using a spreadsheet and import format, you can collate all of the custom prices, per product for the customers you want to provide custom pricing for.
This can be a tedious task to set up initially, but once the process is in place, it will all be automated so every time you create a sale, the custom pricing will be assigned instead of the standard.
Reviewing your pricing in DEAR systems
Once you have collated all of your customer and pricing data and put this into your system, you will be able to review any custom pricing that is listed against your customers, like the example below:
In this example for the customer, Bank West, we can see that they will receive a 10% discount – this is how the discount will pull through into DEAR. This field can also be overwritten to change the percentage of discount they’ll receive.
Within the Sale Price Tier field, you can view the Customer Price Tier this account is on and, as mentioned previously, you can rename this to whatever works for your system within the general settings.
By selecting Product Prices on the left hand side of the dashboard, you can view and add any custom pricing for the account, without the need to import via a spreadsheet or similar. If you don’t import via a spreadsheet, you will need to add the pricing in manually, so this doesn’t make the process any easier or less laborious, but it is an additional option for adding pricing against each customer and allows you to do this in a user-friendly interface.
For more support on how to use DEAR for your inventory management, read more of our blogs, or visit our YouTube channel to see more examples and step-by-step videos.
