Price and Products in Salesforce

Managing products and price books in Salesforce can be difficult to understand at first sight.

This article tackles the introduction of usage of opportunity, quote, and order management with product and price books. 

Pricebook and products

This is the basic relation between price book and product in Salesforce:

It is a M:N relation, and between them there’s the object price book entry. You can have only one entry in the price book for the couple product currency. Of course, you can have more then one row per product only if you have “multicurrency” activated on you org.

With this in mind, it is quite easy to create a new price book entry. Simply go to the standard price book on the related tab and start adding new prices for your product.

Custom price book

Often a unique standard price book is not enough. You may need a different price book for different types of clients, for example.

In this case you could create a customizable price book, and you can differentiate it from the standard one based on custom fields as a source, a channel, or whatever else you need.

Once you create the custom price book, you can add a new price book entry for the products and the currency you already defined in the standard price book.

Price books are smart enough so when you add a product to an opportunity, quote, or order, the price book will show only the product available for the currency of the opportunity, quote, or order.

Add a product to an opportunity

After you create an opportunity, you can add a product to the opportunity.

As I said before, please take into account that:

- you can choose products from the same price book; and

- for each product you will see only the price book entry related to the currency of your opportunity currency.

Create multiple quote with products

Opportunity is the global container of your potential sales, and it will contain hypothetical products and prices you will present to your client, but to go deeper on the offer you need to create one or more quotes.

Each quote could contain, for example, the same products from different price books, or different discounts, and so on.

Adding a product to a quote is just as easy as it is to add a product to an opportunity. But what happens with the product you have created for the opportunity?

You can sync one quote (the main one) to the opportunity so the two records will be always synced. This means that if you modify one of them, the change will be reflected in the other.

Though an opportunity can have multiple quotes, it can sync with only one quote at a time.

Remember that if you sync the opportunity with the quote, you’ll replace all opportunity products with the quote line items.

Create an order with products

You can also use price books to create the order with related order products.

The steps are the same: create the order (and a contract if it is necessary). Then, create the order products by choosing the price book you need and the related products.

The procedure is similar to the one for the quote: for each price book you will only add the products available for the currency you chose for your orderPrice