Pricing Products – Part 11 – Override Pricing Privileges

Colin Maitland, 08 October 2012

The Product Catalog in Microsoft Dynamics CRM is used to define Products and Pricing for use with Campaigns, Customers, Opportunities, Quotes, Orders, and Invoices. Users may add products from Price Lists or add Write-In products to an Opportunities, Quotes, Orders and Invoices. They may also override the pricing on products added from Price Lists. In this blog I will be writing about the security privileges used to define whether or not people are permitted to override the pricing of products and/or add write-in products to Opportunities, Quotes, Orders and Invoices in Microsoft Dynamics CRM.

 

These privileges may be defined separately; e.g. Opportunities vs. Quotes vs. Orders vs. Invoices; and may also be set to either None, Business Unit, Parent: Child Business Unit or Organisation. The privileges are Override Opportunity Pricing, Override Quote Pricing, Override Order Pricing and Override Invoice Pricing. These privileges are located on the Security Role’s Sales tab. Examples of commonly used Security Roles where these privileges apply include Sales Person, Sales Manager and CEO Business Manager.

Sales People, assigned the Sales Person security role, do not have the ability to change the pricing of products or to add write-in products to Opportunities, Quotes, Orders and Invoices.

 

Sales Managers, assigned the Sales Manager security role, have the ability to change the pricing of products and to add write-in products to Opportunities, Quotes, Orders and Invoices at Business Unit level.

 

Business Managers, assigned the CEO Business Manager security role, have the ability to change the pricing of products and to add write-in products to Opportunities, Quotes, Orders and Invoices at Organisation level.

 

An important consideration is the ability to add write-in products cannot be controlled independently from the ability to adjust the pricing on existing products. The following screenshots show the difference between the Select Product, Pricing and Price Per Unit fields when adding a product to an Opportunity, Quote, Order or Invoice for a user with and for a user without the related Override <Opportunity, Quote, Order, Invoice> Pricing privileges on their security roles.

The first impact is that users are either permitted or not permitted to select the Override Price pricing option and subsequently change the Price Per Unit.

 

 

An important consideration is the fact that the Override <Opportunity, Quote, Order, Invoice> Pricing privileges on Security Roles do not impact whether or not the Manual Discount field may be used to adjust the pricing.

In the first screenshot above the price has been adjusted by selecting the Override Price option and changing the Price Per Unit value to $450. In the second screenshot above the price has been adjusted by setting the Manual Discount value to $450. In both cases the resulting Extended Amount is $517.50.

The second impact is that users are either permitted or not permitted to select the Write-In select product option, add a write-in product and set the Price Per Unit. Write-in products are products that do not exist in the Product Catalog. The following screenshot shows an example of a write-in product being added to an Opportunity, Quote, Order or Invoice.

 

An important consideration when setting the Override <Opportunity, Quote, Order, Invoice> Pricing privileges on user’s security roles is the impact that this may have on their ability to:

• create a Quote, Order or Invoice from an Opportunity
• create an Order from a Quote
• create an Invoice from an Order

In these cases, if the parent Opportunity, Quote or Order contains overridden pricing and/or write-in products and the user does not have Override <Opportunity, Quote, Order, Invoice> Pricing privileges for the child Quote, Order or Invoice, an Insufficient Permissions error message will be displayed.

 

Where a Sales Manager has privileges, and a Sales Person does not, to override pricing for Opportunities, Quotes or Orders owned by Sales People, then they will be required to create any Quotes, Orders or Invoices on behalf of the Sales Person when these are required to be created from a parent Opportunity, Quote or Order owned by the Sales Person and containing overridden pricing or write-in products.

In conclusion: The Override <Opportunity, Quote, Order, Invoice> Pricing privileges are useful for controlling whether or not users can override the pricing on products or add write-in products. If users need to create Quotes, Orders or Invoices from parent Opportunities, Quotes or Orders, Quotes that contain overridden pricing or write-in products, they will also require the privileges for overriding pricing on Quotes, Orders and Invoices as well.