Products and Pricebooks in Salesforce

Products and Pricebooks in Salesforce are two foundational elements for managing your sales process. Products are the goods or services that your organization sells. The product record in Salesforce has information about these goods or services.

Pricebooks are catalogues of your products with their prices. You can create multiple price books to cater to different customer segments, sales channels, or pricing strategies. 

What are Products in Salesforce? 

Products in Salesforce are services or items that the company sells to its customers. After defining the products, you can associate them with the prices you have established in the price book.

Products are available through a ‘Products’ related list on the Opportunities tab. In Salesforce, you can use layouts and custom fields to track which products are successful. Products can then be added to a Salesforce opportunity, ensuring that inventory and forecasting are accurate.

Fields in Product Object

Here are the fields included in the product record in Salesforce to gather information about each product.

1. Product Name

It is a field required to describe the product label. The name should be given in a way that is easily recognized.

2. Product Code

It stores the product code, which uniquely identifies the product. The code can be numeric or a mix of digits & alphabets. Note: In Salesforce, uniqueness is not applied by default, so duplicate codes can exist unless validation rules are added. 

3. Active

This is a checkbox field; if checked, only the users can associate this product with an opportunity. Indicates whether the product record is active (true) or not (false). Inactive product records are hidden in many areas of the user interface.

4. Product Family

It is a picklist field used to categorize the products. To add/remove categories, edit the Product family picklist field.

5. Product Description

The product description is in this field.

Related Salesforce Product List

There are two essential Salesforce product lists available for organizations to use.

1. Standard Price Book

Every product has a baseline price, and that baseline price is stored as a standard price book.

2. Product History

Product History is a related list that tracks changes in the product’s field history.

How to create a Product in Salesforce?

To create a product in Salesforce, there are a few steps to follow: 

1. Move to the App launcher and search for products. 
2. Click New, and add the product name, code and description. 
3. Mark the Active checkbox to make it available for use in opportunities. 
4. Click Save. 
5. Finally, add the standard price in the Pricebook related list on the product detail page.

Product-Opportunity Relationship

Products are related to opportunities using an object called an Opportunity Product. An opportunity can have only one pricebook, and only the products in that pricebook are available to add to the opportunity.

If some products are already added to an opportunity using a particular pricebook, and you want to change the pricebook, then all the products will be removed automatically.

The cost of the products added to an opportunity is aggregated and displayed as an amount in the opportunity record. Until and unless you add a product to the opportunity, the amount field is editable. Once you add a product, it cannot be edited. It becomes read-only and automatically calculates the Opportunity Product totals.

What is Pricebook Entry?

The pricebook entry is a connector between products and pricebooks in Salesforce. It collects and stores product prices in designated price books. Every product must have a pricebook entry in the Standard pricebook before the custom pricebook is added. 

Each pricebook entry includes Unit price, Currency, and whether it is active, as major fields.

What are Pricebooks in Salesforce?

A pricebook in Salesforce is a list of products and their associated prices. Each product and its price is called a price book entry. Salesforce provides standard and custom pricebooks, making it easy to have multiple prices for a product.

In other words, your product prices can differ per customer depending on who is buying, when they buy, or the quantity. To accommodate this flexibility, a Product can exist in Salesforce with multiple associated prices using the Pricebooks and Pricebook Entries features.

The Salesforce pricebook fields are divided into two parts:

1. Standard Pricebook

The Standard Pricebook is the complete list (i.e. the master list) of all the products and services your company sells. It is already present, and new products can be added to it using the related list on the product’s detail page.

2. Custom Pricebook

These are additional pricebooks created as per the company’s requirements. The price for each Product in the Custom Pricebook may be different from the price in the Standard Pricebook.

However, the price for the same Product across a custom pricebook entry Salesforce does not need to be the same – it can vary from one Custom Pricebook to another. After adding the product to the standard pricebook, only we can add the product to the custom pricebook.