Price Drivers are customisable conditions that decide how a service is priced, so the price follows each client's requirements.

Depending on the type of service, Price Drivers could include things like:

In Socket, you set these Price Drivers up on each service (for example dropdowns or number inputs) and give each one its pricing logic (for example £50 per 100 transactions).

Whoever builds the proposal then enters the client's details, and Socket works out the price the same way every time, with no manual sums.

⚙️ To set up your price drivers, you'll need your pricing menu in Services & Pricing first.

Price Drivers are made up of two parts:

You can apply as many price drivers to a service as you need.

These are the option types you can choose from:

Not everything you price on comes from an integration. Record quality, how organised a client is, how much chasing they need, these are things you decide rather than measure.

Use a List driver for these. Create the driver on the service, name it something like Record Quality, and set your own options with a price or multiplier against each. Whoever builds the proposal picks the option that fits.

This is different from a client fact, which is a figure pulled from Dext or Xenon and can't be created or edited in Socket.

Each driver also uses a Calculation method to set how it affects the price:

Say you're quoting for a complex weekly bookkeeping service for a limited company with a £2 million turnover.

You set a base price of £5 and use 3 price drivers:

Pricing logic:

Calculation:

((5 + 50) × 2) × 3 = £330

⚠️ Note: Frequency always calculates last, whatever order the drivers appear in.

A driver can be linked to a client fact, which is a metric taken from a connected integration. If you have Dext Precision or Xenon Connect connected, a note appears against that driver when you build a proposal, reading "Note: the current figure is...".

That figure comes from the integration. It does not come from your pricing menu, and it does not come from Xero, even where Dext is connected to Xero.

It's a starting point for scoping the service, not a figure the proposal is bound to. You can select whichever driver option you need. The date range it used isn't shown on the proposal, and the note doesn't appear on the finished proposal your client sees.

If a suggested figure doesn't match what you see in your accounting software, check the figure in Dext or Xenon first, as that is where Socket is reading it from. To change which metric a driver uses, edit the driver in your pricing menu and check the client fact set against it.

Preview Pricing lets you check how a service's price will calculate before you publish the pricing menu. It works on a draft menu and on your live pricing menu while you edit it.

You'll find it in Services & Pricing. Open the service you want to test and click the Preview Pricing icon.

Choose a value for each driver, just as you would when scoping a real client, and Socket shows a Price Calculation Breakdown underneath.

You can see the base price, each driver, the operation applied, and the running total, ending with the final price and billing frequency. Nothing you enter here is saved; it's purely for checking the formula behind the final price.

It's the quickest way to catch a driver that's been set up wrong, like a multiplication that should have been an addition or drivers in the wrong order, before you publish the menu or send anything to a client.

A driver option set to multiply by 0 wipes out everything calculated before it, so the total comes out as nothing at all.

This catches people out most often on a Yes/No driver, where choosing No zeroes the whole service rather than adding nothing to it. If you want No to leave the price alone, use Add £0 rather than Multiply by 0.

Preview Pricing shows you this happening, as the running total drops to zero at that driver in the breakdown.

To charge a set fee for each of something, like a fee per director, per employee, or per entity, use a Numeric driver with a Multiply calculation. A Range driver sets a price between two numbers, so it won't multiply by the quantity, and that's the most common reason per-unit pricing comes out wrong.

If that per-unit fee is the whole price for the service, set the service base price to £0. Otherwise the base price is added on top and your total comes out too high. For example, £52.35 per director with a £0 base price gives £157.05 for three directors.

A service can carry a Minimum fee, the lowest it can be priced after drivers and discounts. Set it when editing the service in your pricing menu; the service card then shows the figure. Clear the field to remove it.

When the minimum fee applies, the Price Calculation Breakdown in Preview Pricing shows a Minimum fee applied row that lifts the total to the floor. Clients see only the final fee, not the row. In the proposal wizard the same row appears on a line that has been lifted to the floor, and disappears if the drivers take it above the floor again.

Price Monitor marks a suggested price that was lifted by a minimum fee, with the floor named in the tooltip, and the menu export has a Minimum fee column. Republishing a menu with only a minimum fee changed on a service drafts a minor adjustment for any won proposal using that service.

Sometimes a particular client falls outside how a service is usually delivered, and its drivers won't fit. Each service in your pricing menu has an Allow Custom Process setting for this, which lets the service's standard drivers be bypassed in favour of a custom process.

With the setting turned on, that service shows a Standard Process / Custom Process choice when it's added to a proposal. Standard Process prices through the drivers as usual, while Custom Process bypasses the drivers and lets you price the service directly, as a flat fee or an hourly rate. See our custom process guide for the full detail.

By default, the drivers you select when building a proposal are visible to the client. If you'd rather show just the service name and price without the driver details, you can control this on a per-proposal basis while you build it.

On step 3 of creating a proposal (the customisation screen), scroll down to Additional Customisation. You'll see the option "How do you want to display proposal line items to clients?" with a dropdown. The options are:

Set it to Title only if you want the simplest view, or Summary to include your service description without showing the individual driver selections. You can preview how each option looks using the Preview button in the top bar before sending.

Note: this setting is per-proposal and doesn't change your default. If you want a particular level of detail to appear every time, you can save a Proposal Template with your preferred customisation settings already applied.