Manage Custom Groups

What is this?

Custom Groups let you define named collections of SKUs that can be targeted by specific pricing strategy steps. Instead of applying a price rule to all products or filtering by vendor attributes, you can create a group of hand-picked SKUs and assign them unique pricing, rounding, and store-level settings.

Walk through it in the app: guide 2012 — Pricing with custom groups. Margin Master can walk you through these steps live: turn on Training / Guide Mode from the Help menu, then type 2012 into the Lessons & Guides box — or ask Margin Master support to run it with you.

A custom group is an explicit, hand-picked list of SKUs plus one pricing rule. It is not a filter or a condition — membership is a list, so a product belongs to a group only because you put it there.

How to Access

• Keyboard shortcut: Ctrl+G
• Menu: Strategy > Manage Custom Groups
• From the Pricing Strategy Manager: click "Manage Custom Groups" in the yellow section

To put products into a group without opening this window:

All three open a picker with the existing groups plus a Create New... entry. Group names must be 3 to 50 characters, may contain only letters, digits, spaces, underscores and hyphens, and must be unique within the strategy.

A group created this way starts out with no pricing rule, so it prices nothing until you open Manage Custom Groups and give it a Set Future Price to value.

Window Layout

1. Current Strategy File · 2. Group list (left panel) · 3. SKUs in the group · 4. Store / Group selection · 5. Future Price panel for the group

The Manage Custom Groups window has two panels:

Left Panel — Group List

A grid showing all custom groups for the active strategy. Each row displays:

Status icons appear in the Group Name column:

• Orange dot — group has unsaved changes
• Red error icon — group has a validation error (hover for details)

Right Panel — Group Details

When you select a group, the detail panel shows:

• Group Name (editable text field) — the name of the selected group
• Active toggle (orange switch) — enable or disable the group
• SKU grid — list of all SKUs in the group with columns for SKU and Description
• Store/Group selection — which stores or store groups this group applies to
• Future Price panel — pricing settings for this group (same controls as strategy step pricing)

Managing Groups

Creating a New Group

Click the hamburger menu (top-left) and select New Empty Group. A new group is added with a default name and empty SKU list.

Copying a Group

Select a group, then click the hamburger menu and choose Copy Current Group. This duplicates the group including all its SKUs and settings.

Deleting a Group

Select a group, then click the hamburger menu and choose Delete Current Group. You are asked to confirm first — "Delete Custom Group ""? All SKU(s) will be removed from this group."

Copying a Group from Another Strategy

Hamburger menu > Copy Group from Another Strategy.... Pick a strategy, then one of its groups, and optionally rename it under Copy as name:. The group's settings and its SKUs are copied into the current strategy; the original is untouched. The item is only available when the database holds more than one strategy.

Finding Duplicate SKUs

Hamburger menu > Find Duplicate SKUs... lists every SKU that belongs to more than one group in this strategy, with a chip for each group it is in. Click the X on a chip to remove that SKU from that group immediately.

This matters because groups run in sequence and the last one to touch a SKU sets its price — a product in two groups is silently priced by whichever runs later. Unsaved changes must be saved before the scan runs, and the window offers to do that for you. When nothing is wrong you get "No duplicate SKUs found across the custom groups in this strategy."

Resolve Unassigned

An unassigned group is active but has no price level set, so it never prices anything. The strategy pre-flight check warns about these before every run.

When any exist, the hamburger menu shows Resolve Unassigned (N) with three bulk actions:

Reordering Groups

Use the Up and Down buttons below the group list to change the execution order. Group sequence determines the order in which custom group steps are applied during strategy execution.

Click Sort by Name to reorder every group alphabetically in one step. This renumbers the sequence, so it changes the execution order as well as the display order.

Reordering is not permanent until you Save. The saved order is what you see the next time you open the window.

Managing SKUs in a Group

Adding SKUs

Click the + button in the SKU grid header (tooltip: Add Skus to Custom Group) to open the Add Skus to dialog. It is a paste box, not a search: "Enter one or more Skus separated by commas. For example - 12345,43251,112112", up to 250 characters at a time. To load a longer list, use Import Group Skus instead.

Removing Invalid SKUs

Click the export button in the SKU grid header to remove SKUs that no longer exist in your database. This cleans up orphaned entries.

Deleting Individual SKUs

Click the red X icon on any SKU row to remove that single SKU from the group.

Import/Export SKUs

Click the hamburger menu in the group detail header:

Import file format. One SKU per line. Margin Master reads the first value on each line as the SKU — splitting on a tab if there is one, otherwise a comma, otherwise a space, otherwise taking the whole line — so a plain list of SKUs and an exported SKU,Description file both work, as does a column pasted out of a spreadsheet. SKUs already in the group are skipped. You are told how many were added, and separately how many lines could not be read.

Margin Master remembers the folder you last imported from or exported to.

Store/Group Selection

The bottom-left panel lets you choose which stores this custom group applies to:

• Store mode: Check individual stores from the store list
• Group mode: Check store groups (when store grouping is enabled in your configuration)

The mode displayed depends on your store grouping settings.

Saving and Reverting

Warnings you may see when saving

How groups run

Custom groups run after every regular strategy step and before SKU-level exceptions. Three things gate them:

• The yellow Custom Groups step in the Pricing Strategy Manager gates the whole phase.
• The group itself must be Active.
• The group must have a Set Future Price to value; without one it is logged as skipped.

Groups then run in sequence order, so for a SKU in more than one group the last group to run wins. The Strategy Pre-flight Check dialog names any group that cannot price before the run starts, and lets you cancel to fix it.

The lock icon on the main grid

Every item a custom group prices gets a padlock stamped with a G in the narrow * column of the main grid — whatever the group prices to. It is the quickest way to see at a glance which products on screen were priced by a group. See The Lock Column.

Tips

Tip: Custom groups are tied to a specific strategy. When you switch strategies, the custom groups shown are those belonging to the newly active strategy.

Tip: The sequence number matters — during strategy execution, groups are processed in order. If a SKU appears in multiple groups, the last group processed wins.

Tip: Use Import Group Skus to quickly populate a group from a spreadsheet or exported file rather than adding SKUs one at a time.

Tip: Run Find Duplicate SKUs... after any large import. A product that lands in two groups is priced by whichever runs later, which is rarely what you intended.

Common Questions

Q: Can a SKU be in multiple custom groups? A: Yes. A SKU can belong to multiple groups. During strategy execution, each group's pricing is applied in sequence order, so the last matching group determines the final price.

Q: What happens if I deactivate a group? A: Inactive groups are skipped during strategy execution. The group and its SKUs are preserved but have no effect on pricing until reactivated.

Q: Why does a group show a red error icon? A: The group has a validation error. Hover over the error icon to see the specific issue — common causes include missing pricing settings or duplicate group names.

Q: I added SKUs to a new group from the main grid, but nothing was priced. A: A group created that way has no pricing rule yet. Open Manage Custom Groups, select the group, and give it a Set Future Price to value.

Q: Can I reuse a group I built in another strategy? A: Yes — Copy Group from Another Strategy... in the hamburger menu copies both the group's settings and its SKU list. The original strategy is not changed.

Q: How do I find out which group priced a particular item? A: The * column shows a G padlock on group-priced items, but not which group. Use Find Duplicate SKUs... if the item might be in more than one, or check the strategy execution log, which names the group for every SKU it priced.