Customer Price Groups in Business Central Explained

Customer Price Groups let you apply consistent prices to a segment of customers (like Retail vs Trade) without maintaining one-off prices for everyone.

Customer Price Groups

Version 1: the funny explanation

Picture your pricing strategy as a messy car boot sale. You’ve got price tags stuck to everything, half of them handwritten, and you keep changing them depending on who’s looking at the item.

A customer walks in and you think: “Ah, you look like a Trade person.” Another turns up and you decide: “You’re Retail… but with a hint of ‘will complain if it’s not discounted’.”

So you slap a label on each customer like they’re going through airport baggage handling: RETAIL, TRADE, VIP, DO NOT GIVE DISCOUNT OR YOU’LL REGRET IT.

Then—because you’ve got a “system”—the same item suddenly has a different price depending on which label the customer is wearing.

That label is your Customer Price Group: not actual pricing, but the category that tells Business Central which pricing rules to use.

Previous Glossary Term: The Sandbox Environment

Customer Price Groups

The proper explanation

In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, a Customer Price Group is a way to segment customers for pricing. You assign a customer to a price group (for example: Retail, Trade, VIP), then create pricing rules that apply to that group.

What it’s for 

Use Customer Price Groups when you have repeatable pricing tiers—the same structure applied across many customers:

• Retail vs Trade pricing

• Contract pricing for a segment (e.g., “Resellers”)

• A simple “VIP” tier for loyal accounts

• Staff/internal pricing where appropriate

It’s a tidy middle ground: not one price for everyone, but also not a bespoke price list per customer.

How it works in Business Central 

At a practical level, you do three things:

1. Create the group (Customer Price Groups page).
2. Assign customers to the group on the Customer Card.
3. Create the prices/discount rules that target that group using Price Lists (the modern way Business Central manages sales prices and sales line discounts).

Business Central can also control whether discounts are allowed for a group (for example, whether line discounts or invoice discounts should apply)

Why it’s valuable (the “stop leaking margin” angle)

Customer Price Groups help you:

• keep pricing consistent across a segment

• reduce admin and exceptions

• make pricing changes easier (update the group rules, not 50 individual customers)

• improve control and auditability when someone asks, “Why was that sold at that price?”

Common problems (and real causes)

If users complain that Business Central is “pulling the wrong price”, it’s usually one of these:

• More than one rule applies (e.g., a customer has a special deal and belongs to a price group). You need to check which rule is more specific and which one Business Central is actually applying.

• Dates or quantities don’t match (a price is valid from/to certain dates, or only applies above a minimum quantity).

• Discount settings conflict (group allows discounts but your sales setup/price list logic means discounts apply in unexpected ways).

• Too many groups and exceptions: not a system limitation so much as self-inflicted mess. If you create dozens of micro-groups, pricing becomes hard to maintain and hard to troubleshoot.

FAQs: Customer Price Groups

Best practices (so it doesn’t turn into spaghetti)

• Keep groups few and meaningful (Retail/Trade/VIP beats “Trade-North-Except-Tuesdays”).

• Use customer-specific pricing sparingly—only for genuine exceptions.

• Put start/end dates on deals and review them monthly.

• Agree internal rules: who can create/approve pricing, and how exceptions are requested.

Customer Price Groups aren’t “advanced pricing” by themselves—they’re a clean way to organise who gets which set of prices. Used well, they keep pricing simple, controlled, and scalable.

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