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Price Books

Overview#

A price book is a rate card: a named set of per-unit rates for your rate-item products (materials, labor, and other cost inputs). Pricing Models read these rates with the LOOKUP function, so a price book is where the actual dollar values live. Find them under Accounting → Price Books.

Because rates live in books rather than on the products themselves, you can keep multiple price books for different tiers, regions, or seasons — and switch which one a calculation uses without touching your formulas.

Tiers are just separate price books. To offer Affordable / Market Standard / Luxury pricing, create one book per tier with the same products at different rates, then choose the book when you price.

Creating a price book#

  1. 1First, make sure the materials/labor you want to rate are marked as rate items in the catalog (Products → turn on Is rate item).
  2. 2Go to Accounting → Price Books and click New book. Give it a name and currency.
  3. 3Open the book — the rate grid lists every rate-item product. Inline-edit each product's rate (e.g. 33.0900) and save.
  4. 4Optionally mark the book as Standard so it's the default used when no specific book is chosen.

The rate grid shows only rate-item products— ordinary fixed-price or configurable products never appear here, because they don't hold a raw rate. If a product is missing from the grid, check that Is rate item is turned on for it in the catalog.

ZZ UAT Book — rate grid
Rate itemRate
Acrylic33.0900$ / sq ft
Aluminum26.8840$ / sq ft
Vinyl Lettering9.5000$ / sq ft
Rates use a numeric(10,4) column — up to 4 decimal places and a maximum around 999,999.9999. An invalid value (too many decimals or out of range) is rejected inline rather than silently rounded.

The standard book#

Each workspace can have at most one standard book — the default a calculation falls back to when no specific book is selected. Use Set as Standard on a book to make it the default; doing so automatically removes the badge from the previously-standard book, so there is never more than one.

A book in the list shows a Standard badge when it's the default.

Cloning, exporting & managing#

  • Clone— duplicates a book with all of its rate entries copied. The clone is never marked Standard, so it's a safe way to spin up a new tier from an existing one and then adjust.
  • Export CSV — downloads the rate grid. The export is injection-safe: any cell that would start with = + @ - is neutralized so the file can't run formulas when opened in a spreadsheet.
  • Rename / Delete— available from the book's detail page.

How rates feed pricing#

A Pricing Model references a rate item through a rate_ref input, and resolves its rate with LOOKUP. For example, a model with a binding rate = LOOKUP(material) takes whichever rate-item product the user picked for materialand pulls that product's rate from the chosen price book. Pick a different book (a different tier) and the same model produces a different price — no formula changes required.

Price books hold cost rates. Markup to a customer-facing price happens later (in QuickBooks), so the numbers you enter here are your costs, not your sell prices.