Pricing rules and how they apply
The six rule types, the order they fire in, scoping by customer or price list, and the audit trail.
Full guide: https://docs.printersfriend.com/setup/pricing-rules
Pricing rules under the Pricing group. Rules are data, not code: you add them, scope them, order them, and the engine applies them to every quote for you.
The three rule types
| Type | What it does | What you set |
|---|---|---|
| Customer discount | Takes a percentage off the list unit price of every line. | Discount percent. |
| Quantity break | Reduces the unit price by a fixed amount once a line reaches a minimum quantity. | Tiers of minimum quantity and unit reduction in cents. |
| Setup fee waiver | Removes the setup fees on a line. | Optionally a returning-customer window in days. Blank waives for everyone the rule covers. |
Those are the three the engine evaluates, and the three the form offers. Setup fees and decoration costs themselves are not pricing rules: they come from the decoration method on the line, covered in adding decoration breakdown lines. Freight is not calculated by the pricing engine today; add it as a quote line.
The order things apply in
Per line, the engine works down a fixed pipeline, and rules within a step run in priority order, lowest number first:
- List price × quantity.
- Customer discounts.
- Quantity breaks.
- Decoration cost and the method's setup fee.
- Setup fee waivers.
- Tax, under your region's scheme: 10% GST in Australia, 20% VAT in the UK, a per-shop rate in the US.
A unit price floors at zero, so a stack of discounts can never make a line negative.
Two things about quantity breaks
- Only the first matching tier applies. Tiers do not stack.
- Matching walks your tiers in the order you entered them, so put the largest minimum quantity first. A list that starts at 10 will match 10 for a 500-piece line and the bigger break will never fire.
Scoping
- Whole shop: every customer.
- One customer: a named organisation.
- A price list: every customer assigned to that price list.
Price-list scope is the one that scales. Set up "Club rate" once, attach it to forty clubs under Customers, and change the discount in one place.
Dates and switches
Rules carry valid from and valid to dates and an active toggle. A rule outside its window is ignored rather than deleted, which is how you run a seasonal price without editing anything twice. Blank from starts immediately, blank to never expires.
Who can change them
Pricing is an owner and manager surface. Sales, production, designer and finance logins quote using your rules but cannot edit them, and the viewer role does not see the pricing screens at all.
The audit trail
Every rule that fires is written onto the quote with its name, the amount it moved and a plain-English description, for example "Volume break: 100+ triggers $0.75 unit reduction". That breakdown is frozen onto the order when the quote is accepted, so a job invoiced in October still explains the price agreed in June.
Two customer-discount rules matching the same line both apply, one after the other. That compounds rather than adding, so 10% then 5% is not 15%. If you want a single effective rate, use one rule.
Still stuck?
Email hello@printersfriend.com and quote the name of this page. Support is on every plan, with a reply within 1 business day.