FF&EZ's Pricing Tool is a very powerful and flexible utility that allows you to simultaneously set prices for whole groups of specs as well as use "psychological pricing" techniques to adjust prices for easier sales. It can also be used to apply a vendor discount. This section covers some techniques to use the tool in a methodical way. 

The same tool is available on three screens: the Specification, Object and FF&E Worksheet screens. You can move and/or resize the tool's window to make it easier to see the numbers in the "parent" screen below it. On the FF&E Worksheet, you can move the window towards the top, so that the FF&E Summary can be seen.

To get an overview of all the features of the tool, see the reference section entry for Pricing Tool. You can also see a video demonstration of the tool at the FF&EZ Youtube site.

To begin, note these basic facts about the tool, starting with the main option:

No Change to Cost or Prices Option

• This is not used for normal adjustments, but for special operations involving the locking or unlocking of existing prices—either all or groups of specifications—which can be useful in a step-by-step re-pricing of a project.
• Other options below are used for changing prices, but you can use this option to only lock all the existing prices to protect the prices that have been approved by a client, helping to prevent an accidental change. Although most prices may have been locked previously, this allows you to make sure that none have been overlooked.

Adjust Prices Option

• Under this option, the tool only affects the prices of specifications. The prices shown for objects are the totals of all the spec prices (and their unit quantities) for those objects. This means that if you use psychological pricing, complex objects may vary in what numeral appears at the end of the price (e.g., 44.90 instead of 44.95). If you wish, you can manually adjust the price of the primary component to get the exact price you want.
• The "Adjust Prices" option is only available for projects with the billing type set to "Vendor is to invoice us" (billing type 1) since purchasing management and internal projects do not use markups (but see the "Apply vendor discount" option below).
• Since the tool always recalculates prices starting with the net cost on the spec, you can run it repeatedly to see the effect of changing the profit margin on a subset of your specs. 
• By default, the tool will not change prices that are currently locked (FF&EZ locks prices you enter manually to protect them from automatic updates like those from this tool). On the other hand, after using the tool you can still change costs, markups / margins or prices manually and the numbers will recalculate just like they did previously.
• There is no way to limit price changes to specific areas or rooms of a project when specifications and objects are used in more than one location. Updates to specs and objects are reflected everywhere in the project just as you should expect. 

For the same reason, you should never run this tool in a project where ordering has begun, unless you take extreme care not to change the prices of previously approved items that have not been converted to orders yet (using the price lock feature is the easiest method of ensuring this).

• It can also be used to apply "psychological pricing" to existing prices that were set as straight markups or margin calculations. This will necessarily change the effective markup or margin to make it slightly above or below the target (usually above). If the resulting markups exceed an absolute target, you can enter a markup slightly under that target and run the utility again (for example, entering 39.5% instead of 40%).
• If you plan to use the tool for more complicated pricing on a project that has been priced already, you can use either the Clone or Export command to preserve a backup copy of the project with the original pricing (however, if ordering has already begun elsewhere in the project, there are limitations on what you could do with that backup).

Apply Vendor Discount Option

• This option is similar to the "Adjust Prices" option in the way it works, except that it normally only adjusts the "Net Cost" by applying a discount to the vendor's base cost, maintaining the current prices for the affected specifications. That is, if you apply a discount (or a larger one) from a vendor, it will increase your profit margin by adjusting the equivalent markup to match the price you have previously set.
• The information in the "Scope" window is adjusted to show what is relevant to the options you select.
• You can choose to adjust the prices of the specs when you apply a discount. In this case, the existing "Markup" value is retained and the prices are adjusted to reflect the new "Net Cost" and the existing "Markup."
• If you allow this option to change the prices, the same pricing options like "psychological pricing" are available to adjust the new prices. 
• Except for the above, this option is separate from the option to "Adjust pricing" to avoid complicating your pricing procedure. Generally, if a discount needs to be applied, do that first, then return to use the "Adjust Prices" option for further adjustments. 

The pricing tool is not affected by any queries that may be in effect on any of the screens where it is available, except on the Specifications screen, where it is one of the options under "General Scope." Except for the built-in scope options, it is meant to be used on a project-wide basis.

Basic Procedure

At its simplest, using the tool consists of the following:

1. (Optional) You may want to position the list on the current screen to a particular point of interest in the list. If you do this, be sure to also click on one of the visible rows to "stick" the list to this current location. Any screen updates will reposition the list to the row that was highlighted when you clicked on Utilities. 
2. Select a group (scope) of specifications to include with "General scope." Note that the items that appear are also affected by the "action" and options that are selected in the next steps. Subsequent changes to those options may add or subtract items from the list as needed.
3. Indicate what operation you will use on the affected specs by selecting the  desired "Change Option" option and, if so, what method to use. For any form of adjusting the markup and price, a discussion of the four basic methods can be found on the main page for the Pricing Tool. Alternatively, you can apply a discount to the cost of an item and let either the markup or the price be adjusted.
4. Decide whether the system will use "psychological pricing" to adjust the prices (either the existing prices or the new ones created by the "Adjust price" option) to make them more appealing.
5. Indicate whether your changes will leave currently locked prices unchanged or apply to all specs in the scope you select (default: leave unchanged).
6. Indicate whether price changes will override specs that are set up as "cost-only" specifications (default: ignore cost-only specs).
7. Indicate whether you will change the current "Lock price" setting for affected specs or leave it "as is."

As you select options, you will see the new prices previewed in the scope display. The two Process buttons will be enabled after you select a scope. When you click on the Process / Close or the Process button, the following will happen:

1. If you selected "Adjust price," new prices will be calculated and written to the specifications that are in the scope you selected (except as excluded by the options you chose).
2. The system will then lock, unlock or leave unchanged the "Lock price" status on each spec in the scope, per your selection on the "Lock price" option. 
3. If you used the Process button, the pricing tool will remain open with all the options set as you chose; if you used Process / Close, it will then close. In both cases, the screen from which you called the tool will update to reflect any changes.

Note that if the system finds specifications in the scope that do not have any costs entered, it will let you know, since no price can be calculated for these. If any exist, you can use the Utilities> Setup Check command to display these.

If you use the "psychological" pricing feature, the markups / margins for each spec will be adjusted slightly, reflecting the adjusted price. If the resulting margin tends to be slightly too low or slightly too high, you can run the tool again with a slightly larger or smaller margin to "bump" the results in the desired direction. However, the results are always dependent on how marked up costs fall into the ranges used to calculate the appropriate adjustment. You can still manually adjust any price after closing the pricing tool.

Advanced Procedures - Setting Markups

Although the available options give the pricing tool tremendous flexibility, here is a sequence of typical "advanced" procedures, based on the idea that you have a mix of products that you want to price with different markups as well as some items that need to be entered manually. 

One common example of the latter would be where products with large quantities require very precise pricing. Another would be where an object with multiple components is priced by entering the entire price on the primary component and putting a price of zero on the secondary components. This rolls all the costs into the full cost of the object, but makes it easier to control the final price instead of letting each spec get marked up with separate prices.

The procedure below takes advantage of the ability to lock prices and skip over and/or override locked prices. The basic idea is to start with the specs that have the most unique requirements for pricing, lock those changes, then move to the more general pricing of the basic procedure above. Each time the procedure calls for setting prices, you will simply use the "basic" procedure above with options set as described below.

Advanced Procedures - Adjusting Existing Prices

If you have a project in which prices have already been set, you can adjust all these prices proportionally using an adjustment factor. This can be useful when cloning a finished "brand" project in which an inflation or geographic adjustment needs to be made to the existing prices — or when a design client wants an alternate "worst case" price for contingency planning. The adjustment factor can be used to "bump" prices up or down; up if the factor is more than 1, down if it is less than 1. To use this feature:

Advanced Procedures - Setting Project Target Price

As in the previous option, this is most useful for projects in which all prices have already been set. Its purpose is to meet a specific price point for the whole project without changing individual specs or groups of specs. This adjustment calculates the current overall project markup and the markup needed to produce the target price. It then adjusts all markups proportionally to produce that price (that is, it preserves the relative markups if groups of specs were priced by type, vendor, etc.

There are some important restrictions about this command:

• The only scope available is "All in this project"
• The resulting price will be close to the target, but rounding in the varous quantity X cost X markup calculations will typically cause some difference between them.
• Specs that do not have prices (where the price = cost) will affect the resulting total, and if there are a large number of them, the individual markups in specs that have prices may be larger than you expect. So you should avoid using the command on partially priced projects.
• On the other hand, if all spec prices are equal to the costs (current overall project markup = 0), it will calculate a single markup to apply to all specs to produce the desired price.
• If you use the "psychological pricing" option, the resulting total price will reflect the markups that produce that style of pricing, and will only approximate the target.
• Subsequent changes to specification prices, object quantities or room quantities will of course change the total price for the project as they normally would.

To use this feature: