Customer specific pricing and the invoice queries it creates
Wholesale pricing is never one price list. It is a list price, a set of customer agreements, a promotion this month, a volume break, a price agreed by a rep in a car park two years ago, and a note in someone's head that "the Murphys always get the old price".
When the invoice goes out at the wrong price, the customer notices. They always notice.
What one wrong price costs
- Someone in accounts takes the call and looks into it.
- Someone in sales confirms what was agreed, from memory or an email.
- A credit note is raised. The invoice is reissued.
- The customer's statement is now wrong for a month.
- Next time, the customer checks every line before paying, and pays later.
The price difference itself is often small. The handling and the delay in payment are not.
Where the pricing actually lives
In most distributors we meet, pricing is held in at least four places: the accounts package's price list, a spreadsheet of customer deals, the reps' own records, and email threads. The order entry person is expected to know all four.
The failures are structural. No amount of care fixes a process where the same fact is stored four times.
One price, applied automatically
The fix is not complicated, but it does need discipline:
- One place for pricing rules. List price, customer agreements, promotions with dates, and volume breaks, all in the system that creates the order.
- Price applied at order entry, not at invoicing. The customer sees the right price on the confirmation, before anything is picked.
- Exceptions recorded, not remembered. If a rep agrees a price, it is entered as an agreement with a date, not a favour.
- Accounts receives the invoice, it does not price it. The accounts package gets a finished invoice from the order system. Reconciliation is then just a check.
This is a common part of the integration work we do for distributors, connecting order entry, stock and dispatch to Sage, Surf or Xero so pricing happens once.
Where to go next
FAQ
Why do we get so many invoice queries?
Usually because pricing is held in more than one place and applied at invoicing rather than at order entry. The customer sees the price for the first time when the invoice arrives. If the price had been on the order confirmation, the query would have happened before picking, or not at all.
Can customer pricing be held in Sage or Surf?
Basic customer price lists, yes. Dated promotions, volume breaks and deal exceptions are harder, and the price is applied too late in the process. Holding pricing in the order system and passing finished invoices to accounts is usually cleaner.
How do we stop reps agreeing prices we do not know about?
Give them a place to record it that is quicker than an email. If agreeing a price in the system takes ten seconds on a phone, it gets recorded. If it takes a form, it gets remembered instead.