By associating a price level with a customer or job, each time you create an invoice, sales receipt, sales order or credit memo for those customers or jobs, QuickBooks automatically pulls up the correct custom price. With manual adjustment, you pick a price level from a drop-down list in the rate column on-the-spot. Both methods automatically assign the correct price for the task at hand.

Quick Tip: Set price levels by item
QuickBooks Premier, Premier Contractor, and Enterprise editions let you assign price levels by item. That adds flexibility when applying discounts or increases to your individual products. For example, you might use a per-item price level to sell a preferred customer product A at $5 off, while keeping service B at the standard price.

Use price levels to connect special pricing to customers and jobs. Examples include a 10-percent returning customer discount or a 15-percent increase for any difficult or deadbeat customers.

For example, Johnson & Sons Construction renovates homes and retail shops. They rely heavily on repeat business, so they like to reward returning customers with 10-percent discounts. They also give 15-percent discounts to customers who offer multiple jobs. Occasionally they deal with especially difficult jobs, for which they collect a 10-percent premium.

To make things easy to track, Johnson & Sons adds price levels for each type of customer, naming them:

• Difficult job premium (10 percent increase)
  
• Multiple job discount (15 percent discount)
  
• Returning customer discount (10 percent discount)
  
• Standard rate (no discount)
  

• Discounts for referrals
  
• Price reductions for non-profit organizations or charities
  

To create a price level, follow these steps:

Turn the Price Level preference on.
First turn on the price level feature in preferences:

1. From the Edit menu, choose Preferences.
2. In the Preferences window, select the Sales & Customers icon.
3. Click the Company Preferences tab.
4. Clear the Use Price Levels checkbox to turn this preference off, or add a checkmark to turn this preference on.
5. Click OK.

1. From the Lists menu, choose Price Level list.
2. From the Price Level menu, choose New or Edit.
3. In the New or Edit Price Level window, enter the name of the new price level.
4. Choose the price level type.
   • The type can be either Fixed % or Per Item. Note: The Per Item price level is only available if you have QuickBooks Premier or higher.
   • If you choose fixed percentage, you can increase or decrease prices on all items by a fixed percentage. You can also round sales prices up to the whole dollar, if you have set this Company preference when you elected to use price levels.
   • If you choose per item, you have the flexibility to set the dollar amount prices of individual items for different customers or jobs.
   
   
   
   
   
   
5. For fixed percentage price levels, choose whether to increase or decrease and enter a percentage.  OR
   
6. For per item price levels, either enter the new price in the Custom Price column, or choose one or more items from the list and use the Adjust Selected Prices button to adjust the prices in bulk.
7. Click OK to go back to the price level list.

Quick Tip: Round Sales Prices Up
You can have QuickBooks round up sales prices to the next whole dollar amount, if after applying a fixed percentage price level the resulting amount contains cents greater than 1. For example, if the resulting item amount is $22.08, the price will be rounded up to the next whole dollar amount, or $23.00.

1. From the Edit menu, choose Preferences.
2. In the Preferences window, select the Sales & Customers icon.
3. Click the Company Preferences tab.
4. Select "Round all sales prices up to the next whole dollar for fixed % price levels."
5. Click OK.

• Apply a price level directly to an item on a sales form:
  1. If you haven't done so already, create the price level.
  2. Fill out the sales form.
  3. In the Rate column, click the drop-down button.
  4. Choose a price level to apply to the item. The amount shown next to each price level is the adjusted amount of the item.
  5. Save the sales form.
  
  
• Associate a price level with one or more customers or jobs.
  1. From the Customers menu, choose Customer:Job list.
  2. Select the Customer, then from the Customer:Job menu button, select Edit.
  3. Click the Additional Info tab.
  4. From the Price Level drop-down list, select the price level you want to associate with the customer. Or, choose Add New to set up a new price level.
  5. Click OK.
  
  
  
  
  

  If you associate a price level with a customer or job, whenever you create a sales form for that customer, items will automatically appear with the new amount. Applicable sales forms are: invoices, sales receipts, credit memos, or sales orders.