Pricebook Setup for Garage Door Co.

[JaredCozart]

Team - 

When I set up our Pricebook, I tried looking ahead to inventory. Because of the nature of garage doors being a combination of many parts, I worked under the premise that you have to inventory all of the parts that make up a door, not the whole door itself, to have a meaningful count. The result was a Pricebook in which full garage doors were Equipment and all of the component parts were linked Materials. The perceived benefits of this were that we could accurately track inventory with linked Materials, but that we'd put Equipment on Estimates and Invoices so that we don't have to manually add the Materials to each installation job. But this has a number of problems: 

1. The Pricebook is huge (like, tens of thousands). The biggest drawback of that is decreased performance/speed in ST. It simply struggles with that many items in certain use cases.
   
   1. Example: one piece of equipment is "16x7 LI1000 TW SP" (LI1000 = Door Model; TW = True White; SP = Short Panel). Linked to the "16x7 LI1000 TW SP" are the materials: INT panels, BTM panel, track, hardware box, springs, tube, strut, stop mold, etc. We have 20,000+ doors as Equipment for different models, colors, panel styles, windows, insulation values, etc. 
   2. Of course, this also makes it more difficult to find certain items and easier to choose the wrong item.
2. Job Margin numbers within the UI are incorrect and way off because it double counts my costs (once for Equipment and once for Materials).
   1. I can download Margin reports and fix that there, but it ruins the UI's helpfulness. 

I hear folks in here advise to "simplify" the Pricebook. However, one of my assumptions has to give in order to do that. It sounds like this isn't how other folks do their inventory, but then I'm not sure how that's an effective inventory count. 

One idea is to stop using Equipment and start using Services w/ linked Materials to track inventory parts. For ex, the Service "16x7 Non-Insulated White Short Panel Installation" (for lack of better name right now), and then all of the panels, springs, etc. would be linked. This solves the double costing problem but not the Pricebook size problem, so I'm not sure which way to go and hoping for some guidance. Thanks for reading a lengthy post and thanks for any guidance. 

- Jared

@AdamCronenberg @stashleyk @jeisenman

[jarrettd]

All our residential garage doors are in our equipment list.  We use a code that is easy for the sales team to remember and type in for each door.  We don't configure our doors from stock parts though.  All our doors are ordered per the job.  Sorry, I know some bigger companies just buy sections, and then put their own track/spring/hardware packaged together.  So this might not be helpful.

For torsion springs for service, we sell the spring per pound.  We cut and cone them in house.  We do not have torsion springs as an equipment item.  They are materials.  As well as the cones.

[Kellic]

Hey Jared - did you get a good answer on how to best set up your pricebook for garage doors?  If not, I'd be happy to share with you what we did.

[candacec]

I would love if you wouldn't mind sharing. 

[dkim]

Hi Adam, Id love the opportunity to take a call with you on garage door pricebook optimization. Thanks! 

[AdamCronenberg]

Just message me directly and we can set up a time for a quick chat.

[AdamCronenberg]

Hey Jared,

Happy to hop on a quick 15min phone call with you and share my experiences with how to best make the pricebook work for garage door companies.  Just send me a direct message and I will share my cell phone.  I am pretty open tomorrow if you have time.  If not, I will be at Pantheon next week, so if you are going to be attending that, we can meet up as well.  Let me know what works best for you.  Adam

[candacec]

Adam I would love to hop on a call and pick your brain on the pricebook and the follow up tab if you have time. 

[AdamCronenberg]

Just shoot me a Direct Message and we can connect.

[Crazywatson]

It would be great if this info was visible to other door companies. We've had ST for close to 2 years now but building the pricebook was so difficult we use a work around. Having a workable pricebook would be great if we could figure it out. Thanks