This article explains how to efficiently transfer pricing decisions from one Buymanager costing to another, saving time and ensuring consistency across your projects.
What is the "Copy Prices" Feature?
- The Situation: You've invested time in a Buymanager costing (e.g., initial, consolidated, or final costing) to determine prices for specific parts. This might involve manually entering prices (Key-in), using WebQuote search results, or finding prices for similar parts.
- The Feature: The "Copy Prices" feature allows you to replicate these established pricing decisions from a source costing to one or more target costings.
- The Goal: To optimize your workflow by avoiding repetitive pricing work, especially when dealing with multiple deals or different versions of the same project.
Why Do Users Need This?
The "Copy Prices" feature helps you:
- Save Time: Eliminate the need to re-enter or re-search for prices that have already been determined in another costing.
- Ensure Consistency: Apply validated pricing decisions across various projects or costing scenarios, maintaining accuracy.
- Streamline Workflow: Quickly populate new or existing costings with pre-approved or optimized prices.
- Handle Different Price Types: Copy both purchasing and selling prices, accommodating various user workflows (e.g., those working directly in the Mark-up tab).
Prerequisites and Audience
- Audience: This feature is for Buymanager users who manage and work with multiple costings, including those creating initial, consolidated, or final costings.
- Prerequisites: You must have at least one Buymanager costing where pricing decisions for parts have already been made.
You need appropriate user permissions to access and modify costings within Buymanager.
How to Copy Prices
Follow these steps to copy prices from one costing to another:
1. Navigate to the Deal section and open a Deal. Navigate to the Initial Costing or Final Costing pages
2. Select the original costing from which you wish to copy prices.
3. On the Header, click the "▼" dropdown arrow from the "copy prices" button
4. Choose either "Purchasing prices" or "Selling Prices" depending on what you want to copy.
5. Select Target Costings
A new window will appear, allowing you to select the costings where you want to transfer the prices.
- Adding Costings from Other Deals: If you need to copy prices to costings that belong to other deals, click "Add costings." A search window will appear, allowing you to find and select additional costings.
- Select Target Costings: Tick the checkboxes next to the costings in the list to which you want to transfer the prices.
6. Configure Copy Options
In the "Copy prices" window, you'll find options to manage how existing prices in the target costings are handled:
- "Key-in prices" or "Locked choices": if you tick this option, any existing "Key-in prices" (manually entered) or "Locked choices" (prices that were intentionally frozen) in the target costings will be preserved and will not be overwritten by the copied prices.
- If you do not tick this option, the copied prices will overwrite any existing prices in the target costings, including Key-in and Locked choices.
7. Click on confirm to complete the process.
8. Post-Copy Actions: Run Automatic Valuation (Important!)
After copying prices, it is highly recommended to run "Automatic Valuation" again in the target costings.
- Why? The required quantities for parts might differ between the source costing and the target costings. Running Automatic Valuation ensures that the best prices are selected based on the *new* quantities and any other relevant parameters.
- Steps to Run Automatic Valuation:
1. Open the costing where you copied the prices.
2. Unblock any part lines for which you want the Automatic Valuation to select a new price. (Prices that were copied will typically be "locked" or "chosen" by default, so you may need to unblock them if you want the system to re-evaluate.)
3. Restart "Automatic valuation" to select the best price based on the current requirements of that specific costing.
For more information about "Automatic Valuation," please refer to this article here.
Important Considerations
- Selling Prices: The option to copy "Selling Prices" is handy for users who primarily work in the Mark-up tab of a costing, where parts might have sales prices but no corresponding purchasing prices. This allows for the efficient transfer of sales price structures.
- Dynamic Filtering with WebQuote: If you are using the WebQuote Price Filter feature, copied WebQuote prices will automatically adapt to the new requirement quantity in the target costing. This means the filter will dynamically display only the relevant prices for the new quantity, even if the original costing had different requirements. (see also the article here)