AL Advanced Discounts and Pricing - User guide

1. Concepts in one minute

Standard Business Central gives a sales or purchase line one discount percentage. Negotiations often do not work that way: a customer gets "10 plus 5 minus 2", a price is agreed line by line and must not be recalculated, an invoice discount comes from the payment terms and someone adds a point by hand.

AL Advanced Discounts and Pricing adds three things on top of the standard calculation, and leaves the standard behaviour untouched wherever you do not use them.

• Compound discount: a discount written in cascade form, such as 10+5-2. The app resolves it into the single equivalent percentage and writes that into the standard Line Discount % field, so every standard total, posting and report keeps working.
• Forced values: a compound discount or a unit price that wins over whatever the price list would produce, until you clear the field.
• Advanced invoice discount: an invoice discount that comes from the payment terms, can be topped up by hand, and follows the originating orders when an invoice is built from several shipments.

The compound discount also travels: it ends up in the electronic invoice and in the printed documents, not only on screen.

2. Prerequisites

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, version 28.0 or higher, online (SaaS) and on-premises. AppSource covers online environments; on-premises is distributed and installed directly by AppLibra, through the AppLibra License Manager.

The app installs together with AL Foundation App, AL Message Passing, AL License and Trial Management and AL Role Center, which come with it.

One setting is on the customer, not in this app, and it is the most common reason for "the discount does not apply": on the customer card, under Invoicing, Allow Line Disc. must be on. Without it Business Central refuses any line discount, this app included.

3. Where to find it

The setup page is called Advanced Discounts and Pricing Setup (ADP). You reach it in three ways:

• Tell Me: search for the page name, or for ADP, or for ALP to see every AppLibra app.
• Your own role centre, in the Advanced Discounts and Pricing (ADP) group.
• The AppLibra hub role centre, in the shared Setup section. You reach the hub with Shift+F12, Explore other roles, AppLibra.

The fields on documents do not need to be looked for: they appear on the sales and purchase documents you already use, described in section 5.

4. Setup

Open Advanced Discounts and Pricing Setup (ADP). There are three settings.

Enable Forced Discount and Pricing. This is the master switch of the forced fields. When it is on, Forced Unit Price replaces the price Business Central would find, a blanket order copies its price and compound discount into the forced fields of the order it generates, and a sales invoice keeps the forced price of the order it comes from. When it is off the fields stay visible, but the standard calculation wins. Leave it off if you only want the compound discount.

Advanced Invoice Discount Calculation. Affects invoices created from shipments. When it is on, the invoice discount is calculated on the discount already distributed over the lines of the originating orders, instead of being recalculated on the invoice alone. Turn it on if you ship in several rounds and invoice at the end of the month.

Message Type for Different Invoice Discount. Decides what happens when one invoice gathers shipments coming from orders that carry different invoice discounts. Four choices: show a message and continue, block with an error, ask for confirmation, or do nothing. Start from the message and move to confirmation once you have seen how often it happens on your data.

Opening this page the first time also starts the trial period, through AL License and Trial Management.

5. Daily use

On the document header

Three fields sit in the header of sales and purchase documents, quotes, orders, invoices, credit memos and returns.

Default Compound Discount is the compound discount proposed on every new line of the document. Changing it also updates the lines whose Forced Compound Discount still carries the previous value, so raising a negotiation from 10+5 to 12+5 does not mean going through the lines one by one. Lines where somebody typed a different discount by hand are left alone, which is the point.

The same field exists on the customer card, and from there it lands on that customer's new documents, so a standing agreement is typed once.

Payment Invoice Discount % is the invoice discount that arrives from the payment terms of the document. You do not type it here: you set it on the payment terms, and every document that uses them carries it.

Manual Invoice Discount % is what you add by hand on top. The two together form the invoice discount of the document.

On the document lines

Three fields sit at the end of each line.

Compound Discount shows, and does not let you edit, the discount actually applied to the line, written in compound form. If it reads 10+5, the standard Line Discount % field reads 14.5, which is what 10+5 really means: five percent off what is left after ten percent, not fifteen.

Forced Compound Discount is where you type. Write 20+5+2 and the line takes that discount, whatever the price list says, for as long as the field has a value. To go back to the standard discount or to pick one from the price list, clear this field first: while it holds a value it wins.

Forced Unit Price does the same for the price. Type an amount and the line uses it instead of the price Business Central would find. Clear it and standard pricing comes back. It only works when the forced fields are enabled in the setup.

Purchases work the same way, with the same field names, on purchase quotes, orders, invoices, credit memos and returns.

On price list lines

A price list line carries a Compound Discount of its own, visible on the sales and purchase price list pages, on the price line lookup and on the price list line review. When you pick that line for a document, the compound discount comes along with the price.

This is worth knowing if you also use AL Hierarchical Price List: that app governs the structure of the price list and who it applies to, this one governs the price and the discount of the single line. The two live on the same price list line and do not overlap.

After posting

Posted documents show the same fields, read only, with the values that were applied when the document was posted. The compound discount also reaches the electronic invoice, as a discount or surcharge element, and the printed documents, as the line discount text. So what the customer reads on the invoice is the discount as it was negotiated, 10+5, and not only the resolved percentage.

6. Limits and notes

The compound discount is a text field with its own parsing, kept separate from the standard discount on purpose: the standard field keeps holding the resolved percentage, so nothing downstream has to learn a new format.

Signs are read in order and each step applies to what is left after the previous one. 10+5 is not fifteen percent, it is 14.5. A minus sign is a surcharge, so 10-2 takes ten percent off and then adds two percent back.

Forced Unit Price and Forced Compound Discount do nothing while the setup switch is off. If a value you typed seems to be ignored, that switch is the first thing to check, and the customer's Allow Line Disc. is the second.

Two roles come with the app: Advanced Discounts and Pricing - User for daily work, which can read the setup but not change it, and Advanced Discounts and Pricing - Administrator, which adds full control of the setup. The role centre shows the setup action to everybody, so a user with the operational role only will get a permission error if they click it. That is standard Business Central behaviour.

7. Support and resources

• Product page and help: https://applibra.com/apps/al-advanced-discounts-and-pricing
• Support: through the channel agreed in your contract, or the contact on the product page.
• The app is distributed by AppLibra on Microsoft AppSource.