Most trades do not charge everyone the same. The letting agent who gives you eight jobs a month is not on the same rate as a one-off on a Sunday, and the builder you sub for gets trade price. Up to now that meant knocking the figures about by hand on every quote.
A customer rate does it for you. You name it, put a percentage on it, and tick it on the customers it applies to. After that their quotes and invoices come out at that price.
Optional, and most businesses will not need it. Set none up and nothing anywhere changes.
Set up a rate
It lives at the bottom of Settings → Money → Price list, under Customer rates.
- Tap Add rate.
- Give it a name you would recognise on a quote: Trade, Landlord, Commercial, or whatever you actually call it. Mucka suggests a few, but the words are yours.
- Set the percentage. A plus figure charges more, a minus figure charges less — -20% is a trade discount, +15% is a commercial premium.
The percentage cannot be zero. A rate at 0% would sit on a customer's record looking like it was doing something and change nothing, which is worse than not having it.
Put a customer on it
Open the customer, tap Edit, and pick the rate under Price rate. Standard prices is the default and stays the default for everybody until you change it.
You can put anyone on any rate. A domestic regular on mates' rates is exactly what this is for, so it is not limited to companies.
What it changes and what it does not
The percentage goes on labour and services only.
- Materials are never changed. Not marked up, and not discounted either. A markup on a boiler is hard to defend if the customer prices the same one up at the merchant, and giving a trade customer 20% off the part is money out of your pocket for nothing.
- The travel charge is never changed. If you also use pricing areas, the travel line is what it costs you to drive out there. A trade discount should not discount the diesel.
If they are on a rate and in a pricing area
The two percentages add together rather than multiplying — the same as an out-of-hours rate already does.
So a trade customer at -20% with a job in an area you charge +10% for comes out at -10%. Not -12%, and not anything else you would struggle to explain. The quote says both figures on screen, so when they ask why it is what it is, you can tell them.
If you ever manage to set a combination that takes the price below nothing — a big discount rate on top of a big discount area — Mucka stops at free rather than going negative, and says so on the document. That is a sign to go and check the two numbers.
You always see it before it goes out
When Mucka prices a quote or invoice for a customer on a rate, it says so at the top: which rate, what it did to the price, and the area too if one applied. Every line is still yours to change, and anything you type over by hand stays as you typed it.
Change the customer on a half-finished quote and the prices follow. Pick the wrong Smith, fix it, and the document reprices for the right one rather than staying on the first one's rate.
What the receptionist tells callers
Your standard prices, never their rate. The AI receptionist quotes the same figures to everybody, and never mentions that somebody is on a rate, names it, or says whether it makes their price higher or lower.
That is deliberate. Which rate somebody is on is between you and them, and caller ID is not proof of identity — the number is right, but you cannot be sure who has picked the phone up. Quoting a trade discount off a number would read your trade prices to whoever rang from it.
What it does do, when it recognises the caller and they are on a rate, is add that the team will confirm the price for them. So they are not told a figure they will not be billed, and they are not told why.
Removing a rate
Delete it and everyone on it goes back to standard prices for anything new. Mucka tells you how many customers that affects before you confirm.
Anything already quoted keeps the price it went out at. Mucka never goes back and changes a document you have already sent.