How to manage supplier price lists to save time and increase accuracy.

Summary (TL:DR)

Managing multiple supplier price lists and many SKUs or price points is time-consuming and requires manual checking to find changes. ProductEngine is a system designed to save you time and increase accuracy. Upload your supplier pricing, track changes, create your sell prices then share price lists with your team and customers. Fast, accurate and secure! 

Managing supplier spreadsheets

Dealing with supplier price lists is challenging and time-consuming. There are multiple steps required depending on your use case:

• Convert them to a standard format and combine them into a ‘master list'

• Add any extra data your business requires such as internal product or billing codes.

• Create your sell prices (convert currencies, add margin etc)

• Create price lists

• Upload pricing to your systems

• Share price lists

Spreadsheets are good, mostly

Most companies still use a spreadsheet to collate supplier pricing and calculate sell prices. Spreadsheets are a good tool for this but they rely very heavily on the user to check for errors and manipulate the data. They work, but they are often a LOT of work.

We often hear that the master spreadsheet gets more complex over time which starts to introduce errors and takes even more time to check and double-check to make sure everything is correct.

And if you need to collaborate, good luck. “Err, which version is the most recent??”

ProductEngine to the rescue

ProductEngine is designed from the ground up to manage product and pricing data. You can easily import your supplier price lists and map them to a consistent format. Once uploaded you can add your margins and charges in a system that understands these fundamental pricing calculations.

Get started

To get started simply upload your supplier pricing spreadsheets to ProductEngine. The columns are identified by type (product code, currency, date, text etc), and mapped to the right columns for consistency. 

Product Library

Once all your supplier pricing is uploaded you have created a product library - a single source of truth! You are now ready to add your sell prices in preparation for creating shareable price lists.

Manage your pricing 

Get started by adding margins, taxes and converting currencies until you have all your sell prices sorted and ready to go. You can add calculations (such as margin) to individual product lines, groups of products or all products. This bulk action feature makes it fast and accurate.

ProductEngine includes features specifically aimed at making pricing easier, faster and more accurate, such as:

• Set a default formula for the column - no more cut & paste errors. You can of course set a formula per cell if required.

• Built-in margin formula (MARGIN). No more incorrect formulas for the most critical part of a pricing calculation.

These seem like really simple inclusions but in our experience, it’s the little things that trip you up.

Create a price list and share

Now you are ready to share a price list! To create a price list select the data you want to show in the price list. We recommend hiding buy prices, margins and any other sensitive data. Then select the products required in the price list. You may have multiple price lists for your different sales teams or sales channels.

Price lists are easily shared with whomever you want by inputting their email. By default they can only view the data, you can allow exporting at your discretion. You control what data they see and ensure they are always looking at the right version.

Free up your time

If you would like more time to spend on fun and productive activities, hit us up for a demo.