Customer, group or list price: which wins?

If you sell to trade accounts, the same product can carry more than one price. There is the list price on the shelf ticket, a group price for a type of customer, and the special price agreed with one account after a long conversation and a handshake. On a quote, only one of those is right. Picking the wrong one is one of the quietest ways a branch gives away margin, or loses an account it worked hard to win.

Three prices, one line

Take a single product on a quote for a regular builder. Say the list price is the highest, the trade group price sits below it, and this builder has an agreed account price below that because of the volume they put through the branch.

If the quote goes out at list price, the builder notices, feels overcharged, and phones the branch manager. If it goes out at the group price when an account price exists, the builder still notices, just less loudly. If it goes out at an account price that belongs to a different customer, nobody notices until the margin report at month end.

Each of these can happen when a person quotes from memory, from an old quote, or from whichever price screen happened to be open.

A fixed order removes the argument

The fix is a fixed order, written down and applied the same way on every line:

1. If this customer has their own price for this product, and it is in date, use it.
2. If not, and the customer belongs to a group with a price for this product, use the group price.
3. If neither exists, use the list price.

That is it. It sounds obvious, but if the order is not written down, it lives in people's heads, and different people can apply it differently. Once it is written down, any quote can be checked by anybody: look at the line, look at the price file, confirm which level applies.

Where category discounts fit

You may also run category discounts: a builder gets a set discount across, say, all plumbing fittings. The question is what that discount applies to.

The safe answer is the list price only. If a category discount is applied on top of an account price that was already negotiated, the customer gets two reductions where the deal only ever intended one. That is how a carefully agreed account price quietly turns into a loss on a large order. Writing "category discounts apply to list prices only" into the pricing rules closes the gap.

When two prices match, stop

The awkward case is a tie. The price file holds two valid prices for the same customer and the same product: perhaps an old agreement that was never closed, or a group price loaded twice with different figures. Which one wins?

The honest answer is that nobody at the counter can know. It is a decision for whoever owns the account. So a tie should stop the line, not be resolved by taking the lower or the most recent figure. The same goes for a product with no valid price at all: flag it and ask, rather than borrowing a price from a similar item.

This feels slower on the day. It is also tidier over time, because each tie that is flagged can be fixed in the price file once, instead of being guessed differently on every quote that touches it.

Keep the price file honest

The fixed order only works if the price file behind it is clean. A few habits make the difference:

• Give every special price an end date, and review the ones that are about to run out.
• Close old agreements when new ones are made, rather than leaving both live.
• Keep one owner for each account's prices, so questions have somewhere to go.
• Keep customer, group and list prices in separate, clearly named columns in any export.

None of this needs new software. It needs someone to own the price file and a monthly hour in the diary to look at it.

How I apply the order in a draft

In QuoteClerk AI the order is fixed: the customer's own price first, then the customer's group price, then the general list price. Quantity breaks and valid-from and valid-until dates come from your own price file. A category discount applies to list prices only. A tie or a missing price blocks the line, so it is flagged and never guessed, and a person on your team approves every draft before it reaches a customer.

The customer price levels in quotes page walks through this line by line, with the questions merchants usually ask before a pilot.

The one rule to take away

If your branch writes down only one pricing rule this year, make it the fixed order: customer price, then group price, then list price, and stop on a tie. Everything else about quoting gets easier once that is settled, because every argument about a price can be answered by pointing at the rule and the file.