Automated Price Changes based on Market Variations

[ciscoaum]

We are a wholesaler selling Gold Filled/Silver jewelry components.

We are looking for a way to automatically change item prices based on current Gold & Silver metal market prices.

I have spoken to some others in my industry & they tell me that they have input the prices at a certain level of Gold/Silver & have added increments for each. Then daily they would set the current Gold/Silver prices and the program would calculate current prices.

What is the best accounting/invoicing pacakge within QuickBooks group or even outside that will offer above.

I also need to often change prices on items that is very manual. Any suggestions on updating prices from Excel or Access databases?

Thanks,

[crikit]

I am also in the jewelry wholesale industry and looking for similar information. Maybe we can help each other. I was trying to figure out how to have the cost field of each item automatically match what the average cost of each item is. Then I wanted to use the "change item prices" feature to mark up the prices based on a percent mark up of cost. I've had no luck so far. When I first started using the Premier edition I remember a pop up message asking me if I wanted to change the cost of an item to the new cost I was recording when I "received the items with the bill". I think I turned that message off and can't get it back now. We have about 1600 items in our system so I am loathe to fix each item by hand.

[ciscoaum]

Hello crikit:

I have since been in contact with some of the software vendors.
Let's talk offline, so we can compare notes & do not duplicate efforts.

Write to me - cfiqb@hotmail.com

Thanks,

[gibbo]

Just a thought. Is this something that could well be handled on an Excel Spreadsheet? Forget the part about getting it into QuickBooks for a moment. Could you import the latest prices onto a sheet and have a formula that re-calculated the new prices?
We have produced a set of tools for MYOB that can get any information from an Excel spreadsheet into MYOB and have just produced the first for QuickBooks - for Invoices. Have not had a chance to promote it particularly yet, so not a lot of response so far. But the concept has enormous potential. The idea is that you do what ever you need to do in Excel, then send it to QuickBooks (or MYOB). The tools are "ActiveX dll's" and their functionality can be called from VBA, which is the macro language of Excel. They contain the code that writes the transactions (or with items, the list) in xml and automate the process of importing them into the accounting program.
Modifying is much more complex than adding new, as data has to be extracted from QuickBooks and then quoted back in order for it to let you modify the item, but it is possible.
So, could you do what you need to do in Excel, if you could then get the new prices into QuickBooks? And what would something that did this for you be worth?