Managing products in Salesforce with CloudExtend for Salesforce requires a general understanding of Products, Price Books, and Price Book Entries.
Products are the individual items or services that you sell to customers through your opportunities and quotes. Price Books are lists of products and their associated prices. Each product and its price is called a price book entry. So, if you want to speak in relationship terms, a Product may be on multiple Pricebooks; this is managed with a junction record called PricebookEntry.
Salesforce provides two types of price books—standard and custom. The standard price book is a master list of all products with their associated list prices. It automatically lists all products and standard prices regardless of the custom price books that also contain them.
A custom price book is a list of products with their custom or list prices, making them ideal for offering different prices to different market segments. Custom price books can contain discounted list prices or list prices that are higher than the standard price.
Products
Products are the individual items that your organization sells. CloudExtend for Salesforce can help you quickly add and edit your Products as well as associate them with one or more Price Books.
See various ways to manage products via CloudExtend Excel for Salesforce:
Adding New Products
Load your product template (see fields in template below) and include the Price Book Entry fields (if you don’t plan to add your Products to a Price Book you can leave out the Price Book Entry fields or simply not enter values in them).
Enter the Product details such as Description, Name, Code, etc.
If you don’t want to associate the Product with a Price Book you can skip to step 6
Select the appropriate Price Book to relate the Products with (it must be related to the Standard Price Book first)
Enter the List Price for the Product
Update all or selected rows to create the Products in Salesforce and, if indicated, also associate them with a Price Book.
New product ready to be uploaded and added to Standard Price Book
New product successfully added (note the Salesforce ID’s returned)
To add the same product to another Price Book remove the Salesforce ID that was generated from the previous step for the Price Book Entry (Pricebook Entries: Pricebook Entry ID and select a new Price Book.
Associating Existing Product with a Price Book
Companies will often use multiple Price Books. With CESF it’s easy to associate your existing products (or subset) with more than one Price Book.
Bring the desired products into the template above with a Data Filter, ie load the template, filter the data to retrieve just the products you want. Be sure that you’ve added a criteria that ensure you will only pull Product from one Price Book otherwise, you will see multiple Price Book entries.
Remove the Salesforce ID in Pricebook Entries: Price Book Entry ID. If the price will be changing update that as well.
Select the Price Book you want to add the Products to (Pricebook Entries: Price Book) and add/update the price. Leave the Pricebook Entries: Price Book Entry ID and Pricebook Entries: Product ID empty.
Use the Update function to add the Products to the related Price Book. After the update the ID fields will be populated you’ll be alerted that the Product has been successfully added to the Price Book.
Edit Product Details (and optionally price)
With CloudExtend for Salesforce you can edit product details such as name and description. If desired you can even edit the product pricing details for one or more Price Books.
If you only need to edit product fields (ie you do not need to modify pricing) you can use option 1 or option 2.
Edit Product Details Only
Create a template based off the PRODUCT object and the desired fields. It is not necessary to add any related objects.
Sample CloudExtend for Salesforce Product template based off of PRODUCT object
Edit product details as well as pricing information
Load the same template as ‘Adding New Products’ (above).
Download your products (using a data filter if necessary to limit them to a specific set of products and Price Book).
Make changes to the pricing (and, if desired, product details).
Update all or selected rows to push the changes back to Salesforce.