The ability to customize Price Book enables you to offer the right products at the right time through the right channel to your customers.

Here at salesforce.com, we understand how important effective selling is to the success of your sales organization and we have listened to your feedback on the IdeaExchange on how we can improve our Price Book solution.  That is why we are excited to announce that as part of Summer ’13 Release, Price Book within Salesforce is now a customizable entity. Price Book customization allows you to gain even more control over how you define and extend your organization’s product model within Salesforce.

Here’s an overview of these new capabilities, with some examples.

• Custom Fields: Your Salesforce Administrator now has the ability to extend the Price Book to add custom fields.  For example, you can now define and add a custom effective date field to Price Book in order to capture when specific pricing is in effect – such as seasonal or promotional pricing. Once an administrator adds these custom fields to the definition of Price Book, users can run analytics to determine when a Price Book is in effect or add the fields to list view displays for visibility.

• Triggers:  APEX code can be triggered now on certain actions related to Price Book.  For example, an email can automatically be sent to the sales team when a Price Book becomes active – allowing you to inform your sales team when new pricing is available.

• Validation Rules: Enforce a custom validation, specific to your organization, on the Price Book.  For example, create a custom mandatory field on Price Book, which is required to be populated when Price Book becomes active.

• Page Layouts: To address specific business needs for different business divisions, administrators can now set up multiple page layouts for product teams for different groups within your organization.

• Record Types: Record types allow you to offer different business processes, picklist values, and page layouts to different users. For example, create record types for Price Books to differentiate your regular sales deals from your professional services engagements and offer different picklist values for each.

But wait, we aren’t stopping here!  In future releases we plan to extend the solution to support Price Book Entry customization as well!  Keep in mind; our Safe Harbor Statement applies to any forward-looking claims we make about future releases.

For details about the new Price Book customization features, see the Salesforce Summer ’13 Release Notes.