Evolution ERP Documentation

Every line on a quotation gets a sell price from somewhere. Most of the time that is a straightforward markup on cost or a discount off the list price — which of those two you work in is the quote mode. Sitting above it is contract pricing: a price you have agreed with a particular customer, which wins regardless of the mode the quote is in.

This page covers both — the settings that control them, where each one shows up on screen, and the order Evolution works through when it decides what to charge.

The Two Quote Pricing Methods

A quotation is priced one of two ways. This is a property of the whole quote, not of an individual line, and it is stored on the quote itself.

Method	Prices from	How it works
Cost Plus	The item’s cost	A margin is added on top of cost. The quote screen shows the cost columns and a margin you can move on a line, or across the whole quote at once. Used where you are pricing to a target margin rather than off a published list.
Discount	The item’s sell price (RRP)	A discount percentage is taken off the list price. Used where you publish a price book and negotiate down from it.

Cost Plus and Markup are the same thing. The quote screen calls it Cost Plus; contract pricing calls the equivalent contract type Markup. Both mean “cost, plus a percentage”.

The Settings

All of these live under Settings → Sales. They are company-wide — they apply to everyone in the company, not per user.

Quote Modes under Settings → Sales, alongside the contract pricing settings that sit with it.

Setting	What it does
Quote Modes	Which pricing methods are available to your sales staff. All — staff can quote in either method and switch a quote between them. Cost Plus — every quote is priced on markup from cost. Discount — every quote is priced as a discount off list.
Default Quote Mode	Which of the two a new quotation opens in. If this is set to Cost Plus, the Cost Plus toggle is already on when the quote is created and lines price on markup from the first item added. Changing it does not touch quotes that already exist.
Cost+ Default Markup	The margin percentage a new Cost Plus quote starts on — 35, for example. It is a starting point, not a limit: the margin can still be moved per line or across the quote.
Cost+ Default Method	What the house default actually is on a Cost Plus line. Markup — the Cost+ Default Markup percentage above. This is how Evolution has always worked, and is what every company starts on. RRP — the item’s own RRP, expressed as the markup needed to reach it. See Cost Plus Priced From RRP.
Cost+ Maximum Markup %	The highest markup you consider sane on a Cost Plus line. A line needing more than this to reach the item’s RRP is still priced, but the quote raises a warning — a markup that high nearly always means the item’s cost is wrong, not its price. The RRP / Pricing Integrity report uses the same figure to list the items to correct. Set it to 0 to turn the check off.

Cost+ Default Markup and Default Quote Mode — the settings a new quotation starts from.

info Fixed Price is not a quote mode. A quotation is always either cost plus or discount. A fixed price is something you agree with one customer for one item, so it is set up in contract pricing — where it is always available, whatever Quote Modes is set to. It used to appear in this setting as well, which only ever caused confusion.

Cost Plus Priced From RRP

On a Cost Plus quote, the markup a line is given is worked down in order: the customer’s category markup first, then the customer’s own markup, and where the customer has neither, the house default. In most companies almost nobody has negotiated pricing — so in practice the house default is what prices the great majority of quoted lines, at one flat percentage across a catalogue where the real margin varies enormously item to item.

Setting Cost+ Default Method to RRP replaces that flat percentage with the item’s own RRP. Evolution calculates the markup needed to reach the RRP and puts that in the Margin column, so the line prices at RRP while the column, the slider and Auto-Margin all keep working on the numbers they already use.

The three Cost Plus settings under Settings → Sales — the default markup, the method that decides whether that percentage or the item’s RRP is used, and the markup ceiling that raises a warning.

It only replaces the bottom rung. A customer with a category markup or a markup of their own is completely unaffected — their negotiated pricing still wins, exactly as it does today. RRP fills the holes the flat default was filling.

Items that cannot be priced from RRP. Some items have no RRP recorded, no cost to mark up, or an RRP sitting at or below cost. Those lines cannot be priced from RRP, so they fall back to the Cost+ Default Markup percentage — they are never priced at zero margin — and the quote screen says so on the line, naming the item and the percentage used instead.

Markups that are too high to be real. Working a markup back from an RRP divides by the item’s cost, so a cost that was never updated does not produce a slightly wrong price — it produces an enormous one. A $1.00 placeholder cost against a $3,000 RRP reads as a 299,900% markup. Past the Cost+ Maximum Markup % ceiling the line is still priced — refusing to price it would be worse — but a warning is raised on the quote so it is checked before the quote goes out.

The same checks run again when the quote is saved, because the browser is not the last word: an imported quote, a stale tab or a re-submitted form can land a line the screen never saw. Lines selling at or below cost, or marked up past the ceiling, are recorded in the quote’s own history and summarised back to you once on save. They are warnings, not blocks — selling at cost is sometimes a deliberate commercial decision, and Evolution’s job is to make sure it was one.

info Audit your RRPs before you switch this on. Pricing from RRP is only as good as the RRPs in your catalogue, and on most systems those have never been reviewed as a set. The RRP / Pricing Integrity report reads the whole catalogue and lists the items that cannot be priced from RRP, the markups above your ceiling or below an item’s minimum, and the RRPs far out of step with the rest of their category. Clear that list first, then change the setting.

Pricing Tools on a Cost Plus quotation — with the default method set to RRP the Margin slider carries a Default: RRP badge, a reminder that new lines are priced from the catalogue rather than from the slider.

A note on the wording. The quote screen labels this column Margin, but the arithmetic throughout Evolution is markup on cost — sell = cost × (1 + markup ÷ 100). The markup shown against an RRP-priced line is worked out the same way, so it can be compared directly with any other line on the quote. While the default method is RRP, the Margin slider carries a Default: RRP badge as a reminder that new lines come from the catalogue rather than from the slider — moving the slider still restamps every line on the quote.

Setting the Mode on a Quote

On the quotation screen the pricing tools panel carries the Cost Plus toggle. Turning it on shows the cost columns and prices every line from cost; turning it off returns the quote to discount-off-list.

Alongside it are two tools that work with whichever method is active:

Override Margin / Discount — a slider that applies one margin (or one discount) across every line on the quote at once. Remember to save.
Auto-Margin — enter the quotation total you want to land on, press Go, and the margin needed to reach it is calculated for you.

The pricing tools panel on a quotation — Cost Plus toggle, override slider and Auto-Margin.

warning Switching a quote between Cost Plus and Discount re-prices its lines. On a quote that has been manually adjusted line by line, check the totals afterwards.

Contract Pricing Overrides the Quote Mode

A contract price is a price agreed with a specific customer for a specific item. When one exists, it is used — the quote’s own pricing method, the customer’s category discounts and their general discount are all skipped.

There are three contract types:

Contract Type	You enter	Price the customer gets
Markup	A percentage	The item’s cost plus that percentage. Moves automatically as the cost moves.
Discount	A percentage	The item’s sell price less that percentage. Moves automatically as the list price moves.
Fixed Price	A dollar amount	Exactly that amount, with no on-cost applied. It does not move when your cost or list price changes.

warning Use Fixed Price sparingly. Because it is a dollar amount rather than a percentage, it cannot adjust itself when your costs rise — it has to be found and changed by hand. Where a Markup or Discount contract will do the project, prefer it.

Where contract prices are set up

From the item — open the inventory item and use Item to Customer Pricing → Add. Best when you are agreeing a price on one item for one customer.
From the contract — Contract Pricing in the menu, or the Contract Pricing tab on the customer. Best when you are loading or maintaining a whole price list for a customer.

Item to Customer Pricing on an inventory item — choose the customer, the contract, the Type, and the amount. Fixed Price is offered whatever the quote mode.

Which Price Wins

When an item is added to a quote, Evolution works down this list and stops at the first one that applies:

Contract price for this customer (and site) on this item — Markup, Discount or Fixed Price, as set up above.
Category discount or markup held against the customer for the item’s category. The item’s own minimum markup and maximum discount are applied as limits here.
The customer’s general discount from their account.
RRP — the item’s sell price, unchanged.

On Cost Plus, step 4 is the house default. Steps 1 to 3 are the same either way. Where none of them applies and the quote is priced cost plus, the line falls to the Cost+ Default Markup percentage — or, if Cost+ Default Method is set to RRP, to the markup that reaches the item’s RRP. See Cost Plus Priced From RRP.

The general discount follows the default quote mode. Where Default Quote Mode is Cost Plus, a customer’s general discount percentage is applied as a markup on cost rather than a discount off list. It is the same number used the way the company prices. If a customer’s discount seems to be behaving as a margin, this is why.

Two further settings change how step 1 behaves for customers with site-specific contracts:

Setting	What it does
Quote Mode Contract Pricing for Customer Sites	Allows contract prices to be set against an individual site of a customer, not just the customer as a whole.
Quote Mode Contract Pricing Revert To RRP	Decides what happens when a customer has a site-specific contract but the item is not on it. Use Any Site Contract falls back to the customer’s “Any Site” contract; Revert To RRP ignores it and uses the list price.
Contract Pricing Many To One	Allows one contract to be attached to several customers, so an agreed price list is maintained once.
Quote Mode Expiring Contract Price	Allows an expiry date on a contract price, after which it stops being applied.

Common Questions

A new quote does not open in Cost Plus, even though that is the default.

Check Settings → Sales → Default Quote Mode. Note this applies when the quote is created — quotes raised before the setting was changed keep the method saved on them.

The Type list is empty when I try to add customer pricing.

This was caused by an out-of-date Quote Modes value and has been corrected — the list now always offers at least Fixed Price. If you still see it empty, contact support.

I set a contract price but the quote is not using it.

Check that the contract is against the right customer and site, that it has not expired, and that the item on the quote is the item on the contract. If the customer has a site contract that does not list the item, the Revert To RRP setting decides whether the “Any Site” contract is consulted.

Can one quote have some lines cost plus and some discounted?

Not as a mode — the method belongs to the whole quote. But any individual line can be overtyped with the price you want, and contract prices apply per item regardless of the mode.

Inventory Pricing — landed cost, minimum markup, maximum discount and how RRP is calculated.
Inventory Items — where cost and sell price are maintained.
Credit Limits & Stop Credit — the other customer-level control on a sale.
Creating Projects from Quotes — what happens to quoted prices downstream.