Purpose

Your default pricing from Pricing Markups in the Estimating tab within Administration sets the standard for your prices when estimating your opportunities.

However, did you know that this pricing can be changed in several different places? These can be considered exceptions to the rule if you’ve taken the time to enter in pricing markups!

Whether that’s in Administration or during the bidding process for your estimates, it’s important to understand the many places pricing can be overridden to answer the question, “Where does this estimate’s pricing come from?”

Here are a few reasons overriding pricing could be used:

If you have variable pricing across your company. This could include if you have regional, or divisional, differences or need to make exceptions based on opportunity or invoice type.

To account for the current market rate of your services. A good example of this would be if you know a specific item is difficult to get during this time of the season, a customer might pay more to get it installed. This means you might add additional pricing since it’s in “high demand”.

If you’re still working on your final pricing setup in Pricing Mark-Ups or your company has an estimator-driven way of bidding.

You can set up pricing preferences in a few different locations within Administration.

✅To create, or edit a service, item or branch, you must have System Admin access or Branch Admin with Enhance Branch Admin Security enabled.

Minimum Charges allow you to set a minimum charge for each occurrence of the service. If the price calculated by Aspire based on materials, labor, markup, and profit is less than the minimum charge, then the minimum charge will be used on the invoice for the service!

For this example, the service for Enhancements needs a minimum charge added:

Now, when the service is estimated, if your estimator creates a bid for this service lower than your Minimum Charge, the amount set will override the price the estimator originally estimates.

In Aspire, you can also set price overrides at the item level. If you set an Allocation Unit Item Price Override on an item and then the item is used on an estimate, Aspire uses the catalog price as the overridden price.

📌Note: If you set an Allocation Unit Price Override, it will be used on estimates moving forward, and won’t affect your current estimates with the item.

When an item with an overridden price is added to an estimate, Aspire uses the catalog price as the overridden price.

Item costs specific to your branches will influence pricing. This mainly applies to our SiteOne integration as Branch Level Catalog Price Lists are necessary for the integration to work. On the branch details screen, you can assign a Catalog Price List to use for your estimates.

They are helpful when setting different Unit Costs for your items that are used across multiple branches.

Standard item pricing can be overridden by default for a branch for items that have a Catalog Price list assigned.

A good example of using a Catalog Price List would be if you have one or more branch locations that have access to a vendor that is offering materials at a lower cost compared to the prices available to your other branch locations.

In this situation, you could set different pricing lists for those specific branches for their lower material costs from that discounted vendor, while maintaining standard pricing at the other branches without the price difference.

📑To learn more about Aspire’s integration with SiteOne, please read this article.

Outside of the Administration settings, one of the most common places to override pricing is on an estimate and within a service on the service detail screen.

In order for you, or other estimators, to have the functionalities listed, check that the below permissions are given to the user role.

💡Tip: Your company should have an internal policy on how estimators will and can override pricing!

✅To edit estimate items, you’ll need Edit Estimate Items added to your user role.

✅To adjust overall pricing on an opportunity, you would need to have Adjust Total Price by % added to your user role.

✅In order to see and use Pricing Overrides in the Service Details screen, you would need to have Edit Estimate Pricing Percent added to your user role.

✅ In order to use negative item quantities when completing change orders, you will need Negative Item Quantity added to your user role.

☑️This permission works together with Add Opportunity, and either Edit My Opportunities, Edit All Opportunities, View Opportunities, or Edit Estimate Item.

☑️Maximum % to Reduce Price is also tied to Negative Item Quantity; setting this percent limits users to be able to reduce the pricing for a service on the Estimate screen.

As you work on your estimates, you might see that when adding services you have the ability to adjust pricing, complexity and more!

Complexity is displayed at the service level in the Estimate screen.

The Complexity field allows you to make decisions about the difficulty level of a specific service compared to similar jobs that use standard pricing.

A good example of this is:

If you believe the job will require 10% of additional labor for a service, you can enter 10% complexity, and Aspire will increase the hours allocated to the job by 10%.

You will notice that the hours column has increased as well as the total price for this service line:

The unit price field on the estimate allows you to override the price that is calculated from your markups in the Pricing Mark-Ups screen in Administration.

📌 Note: For T&M services, item unit price is calculated based on markups set on a service in the service detail screen, which we discuss in the next section!

🧠 Any amount in the Price Per Unit field will be reflected in the service’s Total Price (TP) field:

If you were to override the price per unit amount, your boxes will begin to change color based on the change in price!

Additional options for overriding pricing are for adjusting Service Pricing and Kit Item Costs. These options give you flexibility across your entire estimate’s services and items with simpler actions rather than having to drill into each service or item separately.

This option is available in the three dot menu for work orders and contracts.

The Adjust Service Pricing screen allows you to customize customer pricing for all services on the current estimate.

The three options are:

Service Price %

Service GM %

Total Fixed Price

This option allows you to see all items on the estimate and to individually adjust their associated cost.

This can be helpful when working with large estimates where the same items might be used for several different services.

Next, we will discuss how you can override pricing markups on the service level while working on an estimate!

Not only can you override unit pricing on the estimate screen, but you can drill into specific services and override the Pricing Markups.

📌 Note: To use Override Pricing on the service level, the estimate must be in Bidding status.

The Opportunity Invoice Type is also important when using Pricing Overrides. The following opportunity types have Pricing Overrides available in the service detail screen:

To override pricing on your estimate, navigate to the service that has been added to your estimate and click on the Service Name.

📑To learn more about Pricing Markups, click here to review this article.

🧠The overrides you make in this screen automatically get updated on your estimate.

Make your override changes, and then select Save to continue working on your estimate.

For T&M Contracts and T&M on Completion Work Orders, you have the ability to use Category Markup Overrides. Pricing markups set in the Pricing Table can be used for items on the service based on item categories in the Category Markup Override section.

🧠This area is only displayed if the invoice type is set to T&M. This table allows you to set pricing for each of the item types.

💡 These fields are optional for use, and you can use one or the other, or both!

Aspire uses these markup values to calculate prices instead of calculating based on markup and profit set in Administration ▶️ Estimating ▶️ Pricing Markups.

📌Note: If an opportunity with T&M services is copied from another opportunity or created from a template, the table amounts are copied from the original opportunity or from the template.

Then, when you use the service on your estimate, the override is used!

📌Note: Aspire prevents you from selecting the same Item Category twice in this section.