Discounts
There are four ways you can add discounts to an order.
Multi Week Discounts
For rental type orders you can offer automatic discounts for multi week rentals.
In your Order Settings, set your Weekly Discount Schedule in the Week 2 Discount through Week 9+ Discount fields and click Save. Each one is a percent off the first week's rental price. There's no Week 1 field: the first week is always charged at full price.
The schedule applies to weekly-priced rental line items. It doesn't change Daily Rental, Flat Rate Rental or Per Use Rental line items, sale items, or L&D line items.
A common weekly discount schedule is:
| Week | Discount |
|---|---|
| Week 1 (always full price) | 0% |
| Week 2 | 50% |
| Week 3 | 50% |
| Week 4 | 100% |
| Week 5 | 0% |
| Week 6 | 50% |
| Week 7 | 50% |
| Week 8 | 100% |
| Week 9+ | 75% |
"But our discount schedule repeats every four weeks into infinity and beyooond!"
In practice, most buyers negotiate an additional "long term rental" discount for orders running beyond eight weeks, so this structure works fine for most prop houses.
You can approximate an infinitely repeating four week discount schedule by taking the average of the first four (or eight) weeks and then using that as your Week 9+ Discount. In our example above, this would equal 50%:
(0% + 50% + 50% + 100%) / 4 weeks = 50% per week
Flexible Duration
Recall our notes about Flexible Duration from earlier.
If an order has a duration for 4 weeks, you can turn on the Flexible? toggle and set a Billable Duration for fewer than 4 weeks.
The Billable Duration is not included on customer-facing paperwork, so it's generally not a popular discount method.
Fixed & Percentage Discounts
The more popular discount method is adding a fixed or percentage discount via an order's Billing tab:
Rentals Discount— a percentage off all rental line items. It's only available on rental type orders.Sales Discount— a percentage off sale, service and L&D line items.Fixed Discount— an amount off the whole order.
A new order starts with the account's Rentals Discount (%) and Sales Discount (%), which you can set on the account's Billing tab. The discount fields lock once the order's invoice is out of Draft.
If an order has a percentage discount but nothing for it to apply to — a Sales Discount with no sale items, say — Propcart shows a warning on the order asking whether the discount is a mistake.
These discounts appear on Quotes, Checkout Sheets and Invoices. Let the customer know how much you appreciate them!
Avoid combining Fixed and Percentage discounts; it makes auditing an order's calculations difficult.
Discounts are distributed proportionally over taxable and non-taxable items. For example, if an order has $80 in taxable items and $20 in non-taxable items and a $10 fixed discount, then $8 of the discount will be applied to the taxable items and $2 will be applied to the non-taxable items. This will result in a taxable amount of $80 - $8 = $72 and a non-taxable amount of $20 - $2 = $18.
Line Item Discounts
You can also add an Inventory Line Item that functions as a discount by giving it a negative price.
