Supplier Prices Move. Your Prices Do Not.

Field note from a hospitality business. The owner knew sales well, by day and by season. Cost per product was a rough number set years ago. Since then dozens of supplier prices had moved a little at a time, and each rise was hidden inside a bigger invoice.

What we saw

The information was all there, just scattered: emailed invoices from a long list of suppliers, each with its own layout and pack sizes, and accounting records that showed totals by supplier but not by item. Some inputs, bought in small amounts or without an itemised invoice, didn’t show up anywhere as a line item.

What we did

• Built a price book. Every emailed invoice was read into rows: item, pack size, unit price and date. That gave a price history for every input, not just a total per supplier.
• Normalised pack sizes so a 10 kg bag and a 25 kg bag could be compared per kilo across suppliers.
• Costed each product from its recipe, including packaging, with inputs that have no invoice valued from usage instead of being left out.
• Put cost next to selling price for every product line to see the margin as it is today.
• Ranked savings: the same input bought at different prices, pack sizes that cost more per unit, and categories worth putting out to quote.

What changed

The owner now has a product-by-product view of cost and margin that updates as new invoices arrive. A handful of products turned out to be carrying much thinner margins than anyone thought, and a few supplier categories had clear savings available. Those are the decisions: reprice, reformulate, change supplier, or keep as is on purpose.

The work came from records the business already had. No new software for staff, no extra data entry. That’s what our AI Bookkeeper does.