Pricing Templates define rates and are one of the most powerful features in DispatchDirectTM. They are very easy to create, and even easier to then duplicate/modify to create additional templates. Use care in developing Pricing Templates - you need enough templates to reflect the pricing diversity of your business. But recognize that each template is likely to require some level of future “maintenance” as you change pricing. It would be easy to create more Pricing Templates than you really want/need.

The best place to start is to build the Pricing Templates for your “Cash” business - i.e., Call-In or Over-the-Transom requests - often from first-time and/or one-time customers (vs. repeat customers that would more typically be set up as established accounts with special pricing). It is helpful to think of the Pricing Templates for your Cash/Call-In business as the “List Pricing” for your company - what you typically charge. Building these Cash/Call-In templates as the company's “List Pricing”, makes the templates particularly useful for creating account-specific pricing - providing a starting point for setting more attractive rates for key clients or high-volume customers.

Technically, this concept of “List” pricing is defined by the templates you designate as the “Class/offering default”. There can only be one “default” pricing template for each combination of Vehicle Class and Service Offering. It is recommended that you set the Cash/Call-In template for each relevant combination of Vehicle Class and Service Offering as the “Class/offering default”.

To minimize complexity, it is advantageous to have multiple accounts using the same Pricing Template. You may have many repeat customers for whom you use “List” prices, or that share the same (discounted) Pricing Template.

Any account-specific pricing (pricing that is different than “List” (i.e., the “Class/offering default”) needs to be established in a separate Pricing Template. There are two major advantages of setting up account-specific pricing as a template. First, as noted earlier, it may make sense to apply these same templates to multiple accounts. For example, you may choose to use the same pricing for all auto dealers served. In addition, the template can be used to create other templates with similar characteristics. For example, the template for one motor club may be similar to another. A new account-specific template can be created by changing the description of the template, making whatever changes are needed, and saving it as a new template.

Unless account-specific pricing has been defined and associated with an Account, the appropriate pricing for the Accounts is assumed to be “List” pricing - the designated default template for the combination of a Vehicle class/Service offering. For example, in pricing a new call for Account ABC, DispatchDirectTM will use, if available, an account-specific template for the Vehicle Class/Service Offering that has been associated with Account ABC. If Account ABC does not have a different Pricing Template for the Vehicle Class/Service Offering, it will be priced at “List” (i.e., whatever template has been designated as the “Class/offering default”).