Pricing, Discounts & Promotions

In AWRA an item’s price lives in the catalogue, not in the cashier’s head. Setting a price once means every till, quote, and invoice applies it consistently. Where a customer is on a price list, or you mark one list as your default, that list’s price is used instead, and it is decided in one place for the till, quotes, sales orders, invoices and recurring invoices alike. This is the foundation of trustworthy revenue: the same item sells to the same customer for the same price unless someone deliberately and visibly changes it.

Cost is tracked alongside price, which is what makes margin calculable. If you only know the selling price you know turnover; knowing cost too tells you whether a sale actually made money.

Watch the trap of the “fast mover” that earns nothing: an item priced at KES 500 against a KES 480 cost moves volume but barely covers handling. Because AWRA holds cost next to price, that thin margin shows up in the catalogue before it shows up as a disappointing month — review margin per SKU, not just sales rank, when deciding what to push.

Discounts can be applied to a single line or to a whole sale. The key principle in AWRA is that a discount is recorded — the system keeps what was given, not just the final figure. Leadership can later see how much was discounted, on what, and by whom.

A discount that is invisible is a leak. Because AWRA captures discounts as data, "we sold a lot" and "we gave away a lot of margin" can no longer hide inside the same number.

Run the discount report by cashier every week and you will quickly spot the pattern AWRA is built to surface: one till giving 15% “to be nice” on most sales while the rest hold the line. That is not a pricing problem to fix in the catalogue — it is a coaching conversation, and the recorded data is what makes it specific rather than a vague suspicion.

Free discounting erodes profit quietly. Controlled discounting means limits and authorisation: who can discount, by how much, and when approval is required. Combined with visible margin, this lets a business be generous on purpose rather than by accident.

The goal is not to stop discounts — it is to make them decisions. A small approval step on a large discount turns a reflex into a choice someone owns.

A practical threshold to start with: let cashiers grant up to 5% on their own, require a supervisor for 5–15%, and push anything beyond 15% to a manager. Set the limits where most legitimate discounts clear without friction, so the approval step only fires on the few that genuinely deserve a second look — otherwise staff learn to resent it and route around it.

Different customers may warrant different prices — wholesale versus retail, a contract customer, a seasonal offer. Price lists hold these alternative prices cleanly instead of overriding the base price by hand every time. Each customer sits on one list at a time, and one list can be marked as your default. A line with no typed price takes the customer’s own list if it prices that item at that quantity, then the default list, then the item’s selling price. Rows can be a fixed price or a percentage on the item’s price, with quantity breaks, and every list prices in your organization’s base currency.

A promotion is a time-bound price change. In AWRA it is a price list with valid-from and valid-to dates — usually the default list, so it reaches every customer whose own list has no price for that item. Because it is configured rather than typed at the till, it starts and ends predictably on each document’s date and applies the same way on the till, quotes and invoices. Ending a list never reprices a document already saved, and afterwards you can ask: did the promotion lift volume enough to justify the margin given up?

The pitfall to avoid is the promotion that never ends because nobody typed the stop date — staff keep honouring the “sale” price for weeks. Setting the list’s valid-to date fixes that automatically, and afterwards you compare units sold and total margin during the window against a normal week: if volume rose 30% but margin given away was bigger than the extra margin earned, the promotion lost money even though it felt busy.