We Have the Right Pricing Tool for You | Rockton (Video)

Do you have complex pricing needs and GP Standard Pricing and Extended Pricing aren’t giving you enough flexibility? Learn how Rockton Pricing Management might be the right pricing tool for you! Watch the recorded webinar below to see how RPM can automate even the most complex and obscure pricing scenarios and calculations.

What can RPM do? It can enable date-driven pricing with all historical pricing tracked and archived, always get the right pricing for the right customer at the right time, and easily set up and track all pricing changes, even daily.

Webinar Transcript:

Melissa: Hello. Good morning, good afternoon, wherever you are. This is Melissa Greenhill. I’m a marketing specialist here at Encore. And today, we have Alicia Weigel here from Rockton. So, hi, Alicia. Thanks for coming.

Alicia: Hi. Absolutely. Thank you for inviting me. And thank you to all of you in the audience that are taking a little bit of time out of your day to check out the right pricing tool for you. As Melissa said, my name is Alicia Weigel. I am the technical sales team lead here at Rockton Software. I am in our Fargo, North Dakota office. So, what we’re going to do today, I’m just going to give you a little bit of quick background on Rockton if you have not heard of us or worked with us in the past. And then we’re going to jump right into learning a little bit about a brand new offering that we have brought to market this year which is our RPM or Rockton Pricing Management Tool. So, first off, a little bit on Rockton. We have been in the Dynamics GP space as an ISV for just over 20 years. And if you’ve seen us around, you’ve probably seen us at the GPUG Summit or at Convergence in years past. And we’ve become very, very passionate about this community and all of the awesome things that our partners are doing with customers and in promoting the GP space, as well as just the Microsoft space in general. What we’re going to be focusing on today is pricing and our new offering Rockton Pricing Management, and how that can kind of simplify pricing if you are encountering some seriously complex pricing issues in your business.

So, the first thing that we want to feature this as is kind of an efficiency tool. If you are currently using a pricing solution, like just standard pricing and great plans, or if you’re using extended pricing, you might find that you’re managing a lot of pricelists and trying to keep those updated, you know, having to create new ones every single year, things like that. Rockton Pricing Management has some unique features where it’s able to duplicate and copy and filter. So, we’ve made it really, really easy for you to create these new lists that you need without having to recreate the wheel. So, we’ll show you guys some of those in our demo piece. And if you are encountering rebates, Rockton Pricing Management actually handles all of the interesting rebate scenarios that we have been encountering over the last few months with customers in our beta program, as well as some of our new live customers. It can be really tricky if you are trying to keep an eye on, you know, what are you going to be getting back from a vendor, or what do you owe someone in rebates? So, we have the ability to capture those and put those adjustments at the line level right to the correct general ledger accounts.

So, are you ready to save time and money and eliminate errors and solve those complex pricing scenarios? What is unique about Rockton Pricing Management is that we are multi-platform. So, it doesn’t actually matter what ERP system you are using. Rockton Pricing Management is a stand-alone giant pricing engine, or a great big calculator is how I like to think of it. So, we use connectors via web services and SQL APIs to talk to the different ERP systems that are out in that space. So, currently, we’re certified for Dynamics GP, Acumatica, as well as Dynamics Business Central. So, we are continuously evolving and trying to make this work with pretty much anything that’s out there. So, we wanted to make sure that it was a multi-platform. This does work with multi-currency as well, so we are fully compatible with all the different currencies that you’re going to be using, as well as lots and lots of units of measure. When we say that we want to automate these scenarios, what that means is when you come up with, we need a great discount for our VIP customer because it’s the 4th of July and they buy a lot of grills from us, but we only want to give them this discount on this grill, but we also need to track our rebate and we want to make sure that we’re covering some of our advertising costs down here, and we want to put that all into one journal entry when we’re done, those are the types of scenarios that we can handle. We do have, of course, a date-driven pricing, so when you’re coming up on these special summer sales that are, you know, just around the corner, if you are looking for promotional pricing, whether that be on specific items or for specific classes of customer, we have the ability to do all of that. And we can base that on the dates that you specify.

So, we don’t have to worry about the wrong price being picked up before or after a promotion has ended. And, of course, all of these things can be tracked. We are keeping history and allowing you to archive all of these special scenarios. And then if you need to change those prices even daily, if you possibly are working with something in the, you know, commodities market and you need to update the price of cheese every day, because your production prices vary because of the price of mozzarella, we are able to handle those types of scenarios and make it really easy for you to efficiently get those prices out without your end users having to do really anything. We just want one person that wants to manage the pricing engine and create those scenarios. And once they’re set up, they’re really pretty much done until you’re ready to change prices. Oops. So, we’re going to jump into the product and just look at it a little bit, and then we’ll certainly take any time necessary for questions, but we just wanted to give you kind of a generalized overview and then show you what the user experience looks like.

So, we’re going to jump over to RPM. And we’re going to be showing this in Dynamics GP today. And we’re going to start in the sales transaction entry. So, some of the scenarios that we’ve been encountering with our customers and with our beta teams has been that we want to give a special price to those special customers. You know, those VIPs, that top-tier customer that purchases a lot from us. But we want to give them a special discount or maybe an extra special discount. So, we created a scenario in this example where Greenway Health is…or Greenway Foods excuse me. These guys are one of our top customers and we’re going to go ahead and we’re going to sell them a one terabyte.

All right. So, right now, as soon as we put in this product, RPM has already spit back a price and said, all right, this is going to be $722 for this customer. Now, if we want to see how did RPM calculate this price? What are they calculating it on? And something important to notice is that today’s date is also important on this because we have a price for today and we have some discounts for them for today. Because they’re a super loyal customer, they have multiple discounts applied. They have a 5% off loyal customers discount, and they also have a bonus 5% discount for extra loyal customers. And one thing you’ll notice that RPM can do is that it’s spitting out these deductions or adjustments as we call them to multiple GL accounts. You can specify as many adjustments as you want. So, we could include adjustments such as sales commissions, those rebates, if you’re struggling with royalties, things like that can all be put into these adjustments and pre-calculated in our engine so that they pass straight through to your ERP. And this is really the only window or one of the only windows that an end user would ever see that belongs specifically to Rockton Pricing Management. So, you’re just looking at the sales line detail to see how was this price derived and is it affecting your margin, your unit price, and can you edit this?

These are all settings that you can determine when you’re in the pricing engine. Do you want this discount to affect the margin on the item that you’re selling? Is it changing or modifying the unit price? For example, commissions typically do not modify the unit price, but they are affecting your overall margin. We also allow you to edit these distributions if you’d like to. You’re going to be editing only the amounts, not the debit and credit accounts. Those are something that you preset. But we’ve put this all out here so that the end-user is very confident in knowing how this price was broken out and what discounts, if any, were applied. And if you have questions on how that worked out, we have our diagnostic details, which is essentially a complete audit of how we came to this price. And we’re looking…this is a lot of words, but if you’re looking at it, we’re able to use the elite customer discounts specifically because Greenway Foods is one of our elite customers, but our unit price, before we started all of our fun math, which it all breaks out down here exactly how the calculation came to be, we started at a price of $800 for this particular unit. And now, that we’ve broken out exactly how this comes down, what the cost was, and then what the unit prices that we charged them.

And this is based on today’s date. Now, if I were to go out and change the date, because I have some date-driven special pricing for the week of the 4th, one of my favorite holidays. So, if I come in and I run this new price, as soon as I get to that line and I get back onto my body of my invoice, look at the price adjusted down to $406. So, now, I can zoom in and I can see what happened here. Costs were still going to be the same, but we’ve got a unit price of $406. We’ve changed those discounts. So, those 5% or a little bit less than they were when they were a bit more expensive. And if we look back at our diagnostic details, we can see that this was a 4th of July summer special. And that this item was priced at $450 specifically for this date range. If I were to go for a date outside of this special, which I believe I only ran through that long weekend, I can come back and we revert back to that previous price for this customer. So, that’s one example of, you know, using those summer sales and some of those promotional prices and how they can be used in conjunction with other discounts. And you can kind of stack those discounts however you want.

Now, I’m going to delete this guy and I’ll show you guys how our rebates work. So, we’re going to go with good old Aaron Fit in this case, and we’re going to sell a pen cap. So, we’re looking at $784 as the price. Now, this is a different customer entirely, and this is not considered one of my elite customers, but they have their own set of pricing rules set up for them as well. So, if we drill back, we can see in this case, we have a vendor rebate, and that’s the first thing that we’re going to calculate and send to a debit and credit account. So, we’ve got our vendor rebate and that’s taking off 8 cents. I believe it’s a 2% rebate. We’ve also got a customer incentive discount on here, and this is just a general customer incentive. This might be specific to this item or to this customer. That’s up to us when we’re setting it up. But in this case, I’ve got it set as a customer’s incentive. And then I have a sales commission on here. So, I wanted to make sure that my sales commission was calculated last. So, I set these up in the order that they should be attached to this calculation. So, I wanted to take that rebate off first, apply that to an account, then give them the incentive off of that price that’s now been rebated. And then finally, I want to do my sales commission, so that I make sure that that salesperson gets their 39 cents out of this sale. And then we’re always going to be calculating that total margin on that line as well. So, it looks like we’re making some great margins on our pen caps. Again, we still have those diagnostic details for you as well. So, we had that unit price of $8, and then we applied that discount. If I needed to see what that discount was, looks like it was actually a 1% of the $8 and then a 2% of the $8 for my customer incentive. So, I can always figure out exactly how it does its math.

So, those are the experiences that the end-user is going to have in this case in Dynamics GP. It would look basically the same in any other ERP, because really we’re only adding that adjustment window to your screen. But if we wanted to go to the Rockton Pricing Management engine, this is the engine where you’re actually going to create those pricelists and import in all of those attributes and those customers and items that you have set up in your ERP system. We bring all of those in, and then we allow you to start setting up those prices. And we create Price Books, which are kind of like your catalog. And those Price Books are based on two things, a date range, and a currency ID. So, if you have one currency for Canadian and one for U.S., we would create two Price Books, one for each currency, and then put your date stamp on it. So, it might be year 2020, it might be year 2021, but once you’ve got this set up, you can create individual price sheets. And these price sheets are things like those special sales. So, I have my 4th of July specials for my big summer sale and I can come in…these prices have all been brought in from the ERP system and I can come in and specially set these for the effective date ranges and for the currency. So, you’re just going to be coming into the price sheet details and setting those up. So, if I wanted to…instead of selling this at $450, I could change this to let’s say $600, hit tab, save that. And now, that price is going to be adjusted and that price will flow through to my ERP system.

And these are super simple, as far as let’s say, we want to set up next year’s base pricing in these price books. We can come in and simply copy these. It’s going to copy all of the detail right on over with me. So, right now, we’re copying Price Book Four, we could call this Price Book Five, it’s going to copy everything inside of it, now I can save it and close it. And then when I go back out, I’m going to have a new copy of my Price Book Four. Hopefully, yeah, if it worked for me. There it is Price Book Five. So, I’ve copied all the price sheets in here. So, if I’m setting this up for 2021 or 2022, I can already have all of those sales and specials copied right over, and you can copy over the individual sheets as well. So, if one of these is set specially for some of those VIPs, you could have that set up and copied right on over. Now, we look at our Get Price and this is kind of the test window or your sandbox to check out what am I going to be passing over to my ERP system?

So, if I’m looking at the date, I want to make sure I have that right. So, we were running that special from July 3rd through the 7th if I remember correctly. And I was selling that on a specific item. And let’s go back to Greenway Foods since I know they get some special deals. And we’ll execute this price. Now, you can see that that price is more because we had changed that price in our PM to $600. So, this unit price is what’s going to be passed over to my ERP and to my adjustments because we’re still including those bonus discounts and that extra bonus discount. So, this is how the math should go for that. And we can see, again, that diagnostics is right here, but we can see now it used a starting price of $600. So, it’s very simple to use and very simple to pass over to your ERP system. The last thing I want to touch on is the calculations themselves. You can create unlimited calculations, and these are basically the math that you want done, maybe the promotions that you want to set up. And whether or not, you want to track those adjustments to your general ledger or allow your users to edit them is completely up to you on every single one of them. Here are those bonus discounts. We’re just doing a 5% discount for our loyal and the bonus 5% for our extra loyal. If we wanted to change this without having to ever touch all of those customers, because I’ve just simply put a filter on that said, if they’re in the class of gold, they fit right in. They’re going to get that extra bonus. But if I wanted to change this now to a 6% deduction, I can just change it…65%, they’d be really loving that. We could change that. We can change the name, save it up.

And now, when I go to run that transaction, we’re going to get 6% now instead of 5%. So, instead of having to go to every customer or to every price sheet where this is out there, just changing it in the calculation itself will automatically pass on to everywhere that that discount was used. So, you can see how this can be a lot more efficient than trying to remember, “Who all was in that list?” This just automatically passes. This is also where you’re going to set up those things like the vendor rebate. It’s just an adjustment or a calculation. So, it all goes here. If you’re dealing with tariffs and you need to add a certain dollar value to each unit, you can do that here. If you want to do margin markups, location markups, pricing based on shipping method or shipping location, ship to, bill to, any of that can be used and we can create filters on that. So, again, we want to make it as easy as possible for you to maintain. But if you decide, hey, we’re going to do this just crazy sale, and we’re going to give you 32% off, we can easily plug that in here. It just takes a couple of seconds to set up another calculation. And if you’re looking for increases, we spoke to a customer who needed to increase the cost of all of their coffee products across the board. By this point, by 40 cents per pound, we can create these based off of the unit of measure as well. So, that is not a problem either. We’ve realized that there’s food industry, there’s distribution industries. This is really a fit for anyone that’s selling things. But if you’re looking to base your prices on those unit of measures and have those prices divided out across units of measure, we can handle that situation too.

So, that is what I wanted to show you on the RPM side. We’re just going to jump back over to a couple of slides. We do have some other upcoming events with Rockton Software with webinars talking about some of our other products, but if you are interested in learning a little bit more about RPM, or you have specific scenarios yourself that you would like us to kind of set up and let you check out, feel free to reach out to anyone at Encore. They’d be happy to get you in touch with us. And we would love to have them on the call with you so that we can kind of talk through what your current scenarios are and how RPM might be a fit for you. You know, it might not be a fit for everybody, but we are pretty confident that we can fit almost any pricing need to the point where we guarantee that you love it, or you get your money back on an implementation. So, if this is something that you’re interested in, we do offer a 60-day full free trial of the product. We will help you get it all set up. We’ll do all the importing for you. So, you don’t have to think about that. And then you have 60 days to sort of do your own proof of concept and make sure that this is the right fit because pricing is so unique to each business.

So, with that, I thank you and I thank the Encore team for your time today. I am happy to answer any questions, but I will turn it back over to Melissa.

Melissa: Great. Thank you so much, Alicia. I’ve been keeping an eye on the question pane. I don’t see anything coming in, so it looks like we might be able to give everyone a few minutes back. All right. Well, thank you, guys, again, and enjoy the rest of your day.

Alicia: Have a good afternoon.

Melissa: Thanks. You too.