Updating Your Pricing Journals Through Excel

If Dynamics AX is the body of all your businesses data, then some may consider pricing to be the heart and soul, because making sure that everything is priced correctly is vital. And just like your own heart, you need to keep it pricing healthy and fit by adjusting it to meet the customer’s wishes and whimsy’s so that you are the most competitive in the marketplace. This doesn’t have to be a huge data entry chore though because Dynamics AX allows you to update your pricing journals through Excel.

Now you have an easy way to make sure that The Price Is Right without having to dress up in silly clothes.

How To Do It…

Before we start doing this, there is one configuration step that you need to perform. Excel updates the pricing through the PriceDiscService web service, and you need to make sure that it’s deployed. To do this, open up AOT and find the PriceDiscService service within the Service Groups.

Then right-mouse-click on the service group, and click on the Deploy Service Group menu item.

After a minute you will receive a notice that the web service has been deployed, and you can exit from AOT.

How It Works…

Now when you are within a pricing journal, click on the Edit In Excel menu item in the menu bar.

This will transfer all of the data from the pricing journal over to Excel for you.

Now you can quickly update your pricing data using all of the Excel functions. For example, to apply a date range to all of your price list items, just update the first row, select the remaining rows, and press CTRL+D.

Now all of the dates have been updated.

Also, as a bonus there is a lot more supplementary information in the price list that you don’t normally see. One example is the base price. You can use this to calculate the price lists line amount through a formula.

And then just paste the prices into the spreadsheet.

When you have updated the price, just click on the Publish menu button within the Update group of the Dynamics AX ribbon bar.

When it has updated, you can look in the Dynamics AX Status tab and see that the records have been updated.

But more importantly you can see that the prices have been updated within your journal.

Now that is super easy.