Sales management: quotes, price lists and agreed prices

Problem

At a distributor, the price actually invoiced is almost never the list price. There are price lists by family and subfamily, discounts depending on customer type, and one-off agreed prices someone negotiated months ago. When all of that lives in loose spreadsheets, the ERP issues one price and the customer expected another.

Solution

The cycle starts at the quote and ends at the price printed on the document line. A quote can be exported to Excel and imported back, because sales people work in Excel and arguing about it does not change that. On top of it sit the proposed supplier price and the agreed price.

Underneath are the price lists by family and subfamily and the discounts by customer type, the two ways a distributor groups what it sells and who it sells to. Defining prices at that level avoids maintaining item-by-item lists.

Cost price is recalculated daily by a server task, so the margin a sales rep sees while quoting is not last week's.

The work was done in parallel for several implementations sharing a common core, with each client's differences layered on top rather than duplicated.

Architecture

Why it is built this way

Quotes round-trip through Excel. Sales people negotiate outside the ERP, and that data has to come back without being retyped.

Prices are defined by family and subfamily before item by item. Otherwise maintenance grows with the catalogue and stops getting done.

The agreed price is stored as an arrangement with the customer, not a manual override on the document, so it survives into the next quote.

I moved the cost recalculation into a daily task. Walking the whole catalogue inside a screen is noticeable, and it is the sales rep's screen.

Several rollouts share the same core, with each client's variation layered on top.

Result

A sales cycle in use across several implementations, each with its own variations over the same core.