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When cloning a product record, which one of the following statements is true?

  • Price book entries must be activated

  • Price book entries in price books that user does not have access to will be created

  • Price book entries are not created in the standard price book

  • Price book entries in price books that user does not have access to will not be created

I'm new to price books, and I'm not sure which statement is true.

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    Hi. I've changed the wording of the question around a bit to be a bit more clear. I'd appreciate it if you could review the changes to see if this question still reflects your intentions.
    – sfdcfox
    Nov 22, 2015 at 6:57

2 Answers 2

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First, to clone a pricebook entry, one needs to have the “Create” on price books permission enabled. So it's unlikely that you'd not have access to the Standard Pricebook if you have that permission on your profile.

If a product already exists in the Standard Pricebook, then you'd be safe in cloning it to a Custom Pricebook provided you didn't make any changes to the product. If you make changes to the product, you'll first want to clone the entry in the Standard Pricebook, save the product changes, then clone the new entry to where you'd like to use them.

When you clone a pricebook entry, only the following information can be updated as part of the cloning operation:

  • Product
  • Price Book
  • Currency (only if multiple currencies are enabled in your org)
  • Optionally, you can also update the List Price field.

Be certain to Select Active so that users can add the Pricebook entry to opportunities, quotes, orders, or service contract before saving.

You could safely clone an existing entry to copy it to a Custom Pricebook, then change the list price in the new Pricebook, or clone it to copy it from one Custom Pricebook to another Custom Pricebook while changing the list price between the two.

Important Note from the Help:

If you clone a custom price book entry that is using a standard price (Use Standard Price is checked), Use Standard Price and Standard Price won’t be visible on the edit page before saving the cloned record. Also, Use Standard Price will be unchecked (set to false). After you save the cloned record, these fields will be visible again on the record’s detail and edit pages.

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    personally, I find that cloning products creates more trouble than it is worth, especially in a multi-currency org - I end up doing the work in Excel Data Connector as it avoid endless clicking of UI boxes
    – cropredy
    Nov 22, 2015 at 1:01
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    This answer, while incredibly useful, completely misses the mark. The question is "when I clone a product, what happens to the related price book entries on the cloned product?"
    – sfdcfox
    Nov 22, 2015 at 4:54
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    @sfdcfox Thank you for clarifying the question. Perhaps you might want to edit it to convey the question with such clarity. I didn't interpret in quite the same manner. Please look at the history before my edits and perhaps you'll better understand based on how it was initially phrased. That said, I'm pleased you feel my answer is helpful.
    – crmprogdev
    Nov 22, 2015 at 6:26
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    I've edited the question and added a comment suggesting the OP review the question. In the interim, I'd like to take a moment and say that I do enjoy reading your answers, because the platform is full of gotchas that only exist in the manual, which is way too long to read from front to back every release.
    – sfdcfox
    Nov 22, 2015 at 7:06
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According to the "Help & Training" documentation (located here), the behavior is supposed to be as follows:

The Clone button on a product quickly creates a new product with the same information as the existing product. Cloning products also creates any price book entries in price books that you can view. Price book entries in price books that you do not have sharing access to will not be created. (Emphasis mine)

However, I performed a quick test, and it appears that this may not always be true. I created a custom profile that had the following permissions:

Products Tab [Default On]

API Enabled
Chatter Internal User
View Help Link
Allow View Knowledge

Product Read, Create

All other permissions were disabled, including any administrative permissions, etc. Next, I created a user that has no role assigned to it, so it cannot receive sharing by hierarchy. After that, I set Price Book access to Private, so the user has no ability to look at any Price Book not shared to them. I also verified that they could not see any price books at all; they can't even see the tab.

I then logged in as that user and performed a product clone using the standard button. The product page appeared correctly, as no price book entries were displayed on the related list. However, going back to the record as the administrator, I could see that the product did indeed clone all of the line items, contrary to the Help topic I quoted earlier.

So, the correct answer (today) appears to be "prices in price books the user does not have access to will be created," while the correct answer according to the documentation is "prices in price books the user does not have access to will not be created."

I'm going to write support and find out what's going on here; this is one of those times where the observed system behavior is directly opposing the documented behavior of the system.

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