Configure Price Engines: formula-driven pricing, conditional rules and amount distribution

Open Sales › Configuration › Settings and find the Price Engine section. Two settings live there, and both are stored system-wide rather than per user.

1. Go to Sales › Configuration › Price Engines and click New.
2. Enter a Name that says what it prices, for example Volume Discount — Aluminium Profiles.
3. On the Formula tab, type the expression. Write each input as {{name}}, for example {{product_price}} * (1 - {{discount}} / 100).
4. Open the Variables tab. Every {{name}} you typed is already listed — map each one to a field, or to a fixed number, and give it a Sample Value.
5. Click Test Formula. The Test Result under the formula shows what the sample values produce, or the error that stops it.
6. Optionally restrict the engine to a date window or to named customers on the Restrictions tab.
7. Click Submit for Approval, then have the approver click Approve. Only approved engines can be selected on an order line.

The list at Sales › Configuration › Price Engines colours each row by state: blue for draft, amber for pending approval, green for approved. Drag the handle at the left of a row to reorder.

The search view offers filters for Draft, Pending, Approved and Archived, and lets you search by name, state or company.

The status bar at the top right shows Draft › Pending Approval › Approved. The buttons beside it appear according to state and role:

Three round buttons sit above the form:

Under the title are the identifying fields:

The formula is one expression that must produce a number — the unit price. It is not a script: there are no loops, no assignments and no access to records beyond the variables you mapped. Anything outside the list below is refused when the formula is checked.

The tab itself holds four things:

Below them sits a permanent Quick Reference panel repeating the operators, the functions, the comparison symbols and two worked examples, so you do not have to leave the form to remember the syntax.

Conditional rules let one engine price different situations differently, without maintaining a separate engine for each. Each rule is a single condition plus its own formula; rules are checked in Sequence order and the first one that matches is used. If none match, the base formula on the Formula tab is the fallback.

The tab opens as an editable list. Inactive rules are greyed out.

Open a rule to reach its full form, grouped into Rule, Condition and Formula Branch:

The operators are: is equal to, is not equal to, is greater than, is greater than or equal to, is less than, is less than or equal to, contains, does not contain, is one of, is not one of, is set, is not set.

Two groups, Date-Based Pricing and Customer-Specific Pricing, decide when and for whom the engine may be attached to a line.

Outside the window, or for a customer not on the list, the engine simply is not attached and the product's ordinary sales price is used. That is what makes a seasonal price expire by itself. The tab also carries a short built-in reminder of these rules under the two groups.

Variables are detected from the formula text, so the list fills itself; you cannot add or delete rows here, only configure them. A blue banner at the top of the tab says as much. Click a row to open it.

Where a variable's field lives decides when the price refreshes:

Description is a free rich-text field. Use it for the commercial intent a formula cannot express: who negotiated this pricing, what it replaces, when it should be reviewed.

Version History is visible to managers and is entirely read-only — you cannot add, edit or delete a snapshot. One is written automatically whenever a formula changes, a conditional rule changes, or the engine moves between states.

Formula Examples is a read-only page of ready-made expressions with an explanation of each, generated by the system. It is a reference to copy from, not something you edit.

Below the tabs, the ordinary chatter records every state change, every approval and every message, with its author and timestamp.

In Draft an engine is editable and invisible to sales. Submit for Approval moves it to Pending Approval; every variable must be mapped first, the base formula must evaluate cleanly, and every active conditional rule is re-checked against the sample values — so a rule that cannot evaluate is caught here rather than on a customer's quotation.

The approver — any Price Engine Manager, or the user named as approver in Settings — clicks Approve, which stamps Approved By and Approved Date. Only approved engines can be chosen on a sale order line, or set as a product's default.

Reset to Draft pulls a live engine back for editing and clears the approval stamps; it asks for confirmation first and is limited to managers. Changing the formula or the rules of an approved engine records a version snapshot before the change.

One product at a time: open the product and set Price Engine — it sits just under Product Category on the product form, and offers approved engines only. Every product created from now on starts with the shipped Product Sale Price engine already in that field.

Many products at once: open the approved engine and click Apply to Products.

The order line carries the calculation. Add these columns with the (adjust settings) icon at the right of the column titles if they are hidden:

Open a line in its own form and click Explain Price. The window that opens answers "why did this line price like that?" in one screen:

The Recalculate Prices button under the order lines re-runs every line's engine — the way to pick up a change that real-time tracking does not catch, such as a new cost, a corrected formula, or a different customer on the order.

If no line carries a manual override it simply recalculates and tells you it is done. If any line does, a confirmation window opens first, reporting how many lines are protected and how many will be recalculated, and offering:

The window also reminds you of the middle path: untick Manual Override on the specific lines you want re-priced, then press the button again.

Distribute Amount solves the opposite problem: the total is agreed with the customer and the lines have to add up to it.

Clicking Apply rewrites every line's unit price in proportion to its current subtotal. Rounding is done by largest remainder, so the distributed lines sum to the target exactly rather than landing a few units away from it. Section and note lines are skipped, as are lines with no quantity; a line discounted 100%, or an order whose total is zero, cannot be distributed and the wizard says so instead of guessing.

Each run is recorded on the order's Price Distribution tab:

The list cannot be created, edited or deleted by hand — it is an audit trail, kept alongside the note the distribution posts in the chatter.

Before an engine touches live pricing, open it and click Price Simulation. The filters decide what it replays:

Press Run Simulation and the wizard reports totals — Total Lines, Current Total, New Total and Total Difference — over a line-by-line table:

Simulating changes nothing: no order is touched, and you close the window when you are done. Reading a simulation before approval is the cheapest way to catch a rule whose sequence is wrong or a variable mapped to the wrong field.

Pre-built templates ship with the module — tiered volume discount, per-unit bulk discount, minimum margin guarantee, minimum order pricing, price floor, cost-plus markup, variable margin by quantity and more. They appear in the Price Engines list like any other engine. Open one, read how it is built, and duplicate it as the starting point for your own.

Export Formula downloads the engine as a JSON file carrying the name, description, base formula, every variable with its model and field mapping, and every conditional rule with its condition and branch formula.

Import Formula, available to administrators, takes that file back in.

The wizard also carries short on-screen instructions. This is how a formula proven on one company or one database is moved without retyping it.

For fabricated openings, the design itself supplies the number to price on. When a WebCC design is analysed, it writes Design System Amount onto the sale order line: the sum, for one unit of that design, of each frame's area multiplied by the price rate per m² of the profile system (and colour) that frame resolves to. Those rates live on the profile system and on its colour mappings as Price Rate (per m²).

Because it is a numeric field on the order line, it can be mapped as a variable and used like any other:

Engines, rules, versions and distribution history are all company-scoped, so a multi-company database keeps each company's pricing to itself. The shipped default engine is the exception: it belongs to no company on purpose, and nobody may edit or delete it.