The module price books are used to administer your price books in.

A price book can server many various purposes. If you have a large number of products in your inventory it could be convenient to be able to create and print a price book that e.g. only contained your printers.

The price book module is divided into a few sections and looks like this:

As the illustration shows the price book module consists of 4 sections.

 Functions.

The icon bar contains a few functions that only affect the currently selected price book. The available functions are: "Export", "Print", "Show / Hide details" and "Quick search settings", which is illustrated like this:

 Selection and administration of price books.

In this section you choose which price book you wish to work with. The section also contains the button: "Administer price books" which is used to administer your price books.

By default there are no price books in Service Suite. This is why we will create a new price book, by pressing the button: "Administer price books", which will launch this dialog:

In this dialog you can create, edit and delete your price books. As we wish to create a new price book we press the button: "New price book" and a new dialog will be shown:

Here you can enter the name of your price book as well as a brief description. In this example we wish to create a price book containing all our printers, which is why we name the price book: "Printers" and press the button: "OK".

From the list of available price books we can see that the price book: "Printers" has been created, and when we press the button: "OK", it will be possible to select this price book from the price book module:

It is possible to create as many price books as you like.

 The price book.

A price book without any products is not very usable, so now that we have just created a price book we will add a few printers to this price book.

You can add products to your price book by pressing the button: "Add items", which will launch this dialog:

In this dialog you can search in all of your products contained in the product module. Searching for products is done in exactly the same way as in the product module. In this case we have searched for all products where the description contains the word "Printer". Then we select the products that we wish to insert into our price book.

When the products have been selected the link: "Insert items" is clicked, and the selected products will be inserted:

You can insert as many products as you like on each price book.

 Details.

The last section is the details. Here you can view the registered data for the product currently selected from the price book:

 Quick search

A hidden feature in the price book module is, that instead of using the "Add items" button you can choose to use the quick search to add products to your price books. This can be enabled by clicking in the link: "Quick search settings" from the icon bar, which will launch this dialog:

In this dialog you can select in which modules you wish to use the quick search. If you wish to use the quick search in the price books, you check the "Price books" checkbox. Here you can also determine which fields the quick search should use, when searching for products. When these fields are selected you press the button: "OK", and the price book module will look like this:

As the above illustration shows a new quick search area has appeared, which can be used to easily insert products on your price books. If we take a closer look on this quick search area, it looks like this:

In this quick search area you can enter your item number and press Enter. By doing this Service Suite will find the product with that item number, and you can press the button: "Insert" to insert the found product on your price book.

Which fields the quick-search search in depends on which fields were checked under the quick search settings dialog.

 Exporting & Printing price books.

The price books can naturally be both printed and exported. This can be done by selecting the price book that you wish to print or export, and select the corresponding function from the icon bar.

If you have a valid license for the Report Designer you can also design your own reports for your price books.

The way in which reports are created and price books exported is almost identical to how this is done in the customer and product module of Service Suite, why this is not described in this article.

 Tips & Tricks.

At the moment there are no Tips & Tricks about the use of price books.

In the Tips & Tricks section of the stock count module however, there are a few articles explaining how the price books can be used in combination with the stock count module. If you e.g. have several service cars, or other forms of "mobile warehouses", you can create a price book of the products that each of these locations contains. This will make it easy to count the stock in each location e.g. once a month, and can help reduce the amount of products "gone missing". You can read more about how this can be done in the article: "How do I create a stock count and add products to this?"

The price books can be used in various ingenious ways. If you are using the price books in an unconventional way, we would very much like to hear from you.

If you have any questions about the use of price books in Service Suite, you are always welcome to contact us at: servicesuite@mamut.com