Grouping Price Modifiers

Transcript

In this video, we're going to talk about grouping price modifiers. Ordinarily, a price modifier in OnTime delivery software performs one calculation, very straightforward, accomplishing one specific task. However, if you can build multiple price modifiers and combine them, use them as building blocks, you can arrive at much more complex pricing that your business may need. So, when we talk about grouping price modifiers, we're actually talking about treating modifiers as building blocks and grouping them together to accomplish this more advanced pricing. In this demonstration, I thought that I would use the example of insurance.

So, I am going to open OnTime Management Suite, go over to prices, and go to my price modifiers list. I've prepared an example of insurance and the idea is that I'm going to have two basic calculations: one that establishes my base price for insurance and a second calculation that arrives at the incremental amount based on declared value. Let's take a look at these.

First of all, the base price. I've created a modifier, which, very simply, does a Flat Amount of $2. That's all this modifier does: establish a $2 base price. So, we will close that.

Now, let's look at the incremental modifier. In this case, I am looking at the Declared Value and assessing a charge of $1.25 for every $100 of Declared Value that is specified. Now, I'm doing this also in a Range between 100 and 100,000. What this means is, we want the person to be covered for the base price of $2 and we want this to cover the first $100 of insurance, but after that, each additional $100 of Declared Value with assess a charge of $1.25 for insurance.

Now we have our two basic calculations. The third thing we need to do is group them together. To do this, right-click anywhere in your price modifier list and choose New Group. I've already created a group here, so let me just open that one and we will see how this looks. The first thing you do is, at the top, give it a Name. I've named the other ones to indicate that they represent the individual calculations, but on my group modifier, I'm just going to name it "Insurance" because that represents my insurance charge as a whole. The Behaviour that you can use here tells OnTime how you want to compare these individual modifiers, we'll come back to that in a second. Down here at the bottom, we have our Group List. These represent all of the modifiers that you would like OnTime to look at and compare with each other. To get them in this Group List, simply find the modifier in your list of all modifiers on the right hand side, and then just drag-and-drop it over into the Group List. I've already dragged in the two modifiers that we were looking at earlier: the base and incremental.

Now that I have these two modifiers over here, I want to set the Behaviour to Use the sum of all modifiers. This will cause OnTime to always assess that $2 base charge, but then, as it evaluates the incremental charge, it will only add that to the base charge if it applies and how it applies. Other options here are Use the highest priced modifier and Use the lowest priced modifier. Between these three Behaviours, you can arrive at all kinds of great pricing schemes. For instance, the highest priced modifier is excellent in cases of actual weight versus dimensional weight. You can have two modifiers that calculate each of those and then have OnTime courier software use whichever is the higher of those two weight calculations.

That's all we need to do to create our group. The last step is to add this group to one of our Price Sets so that it is available to our customers. Let me move over to my Price Set area, open up a Price Set, and, once that's open, we'll go to our Price Modifiers list. Scroll down to find Insurance and we'll see it here. I've already got it checked. Note that we do see all three of the modifiers that we created in this example, but when it comes to making it available to a customer, you don't need to check all three. Just check the group, the one that we created. Adding the other two will just probably confuse your customers because they'll see three different insurance charges or options instead of just the one. So, when it comes to assigning it to a Price Set, only include the group and we'll take care of the rest as far as making sure these other two are included behind the scenes.

That is how you can group modifiers, add more power to your pricing, and extend that to your customers. If you have any additional questions on how these grouped price modifiers work, please contact OnTime Customer Support and we'll be glad to assist.