Product prices explained

Every variant row in the Variants grid carries up to three money columns — a stocked product shows all three, others only two — and they are easy to mix up. Only one of them is the price your customer pays. This guide explains what each is for, which are optional, and which you can still change after the product is saved.

All three live on the variant, not the product — so a coffee in three sizes has three of each, one per size.

The three fields

Selling Price — what the customer pays

This is the real one. It is the amount the POS charges, the number that lands on the receipt, and the figure your revenue reports are built from. Cà Phê Sài Gòn’s Cà phê sữa đá carries 29,000, 35,000 and 39,000 — one per size.

A variant is not sellable without it. You type it while the row is new, and once the product is saved the cell stops accepting input, so get it right before you press Save. Later price changes are handled in the Pricing area rather than by retyping the cell — that is also where a price that differs by sale channel is set.

Listing Price — the reference price

Listing Price is optional and purely informational: the price the item would normally go for, kept alongside what you actually charge. Shops use it for a recommended retail price, or to record what something sold for before a reduction.

Two things worth knowing before you rely on it:

• It is not charged. Whatever you put here, the customer pays the Selling Price.
• The POS does not display it. Setting a Listing Price above your Selling Price will not show customers a struck-through “was” price at the till.

It is the one money field that stays editable for the life of the product, which makes it a safe place to record a figure you expect to revise.

Cost — what you paid

Cost is what the item costs you, not your customer — the supplier price for one unit. It appears only on Storable products, because it is a stock figure rather than a selling one, and it is optional.

What it does is narrower than it looks: it is an opening figure. BANA reads it once, when the product is created, to seed the item’s average cost. From then on it is maintained in the stock list, and receiving a purchase order updates the average cost on its own as prices change. That is why the cell is read-only on a saved product — the number it seeded has already moved on.

Leave it blank if you don’t know it. Fill it in if you want your inventory value and margins to mean something from day one.

A note on names: the same idea appears under different labels on different screens. Cost on the product form is the opening purchase price; the stock list calls the running figure Cost too, and a combo’s read-only Variant Cost is something else entirely — the total of what the items inside would sell for.

What this means when you’re creating a product

• Fill in Selling Price on every row. Nothing sells without it, and you cannot retype it afterwards.
• Fill in Cost if you know it and the product is stocked. It only counts at creation.
• Leave Listing Price blank unless you have a use for it. It changes nothing at the till and you can add it any time.

What’s next

• Put the three into practice — add your first product.
• Price each size differently — set up options and variants.
• Build the rest of the list — complete your product list.

One price the customer pays, one for reference, one for you — and only the first is required.