The price rise nobody noticed
Your unit supplier sent a new price list in January. It was an attachment to an email that went to the accounts inbox. The designers kept using the old costs in their pricing spreadsheet until March, when someone compared an invoice with a quote and found every carcass had gone up. Every kitchen sold in those two months was priced on the old figures.
Appliances are worse. Prices move constantly, promotions come and go, and the designer often looks up a price once at the design stage and never again, even if the order is placed weeks later.
Why prices go stale
Kitchen quotes pull from many sources: carcasses and doors from the unit supplier, worktops from a fabricator, appliances from a distributor, sinks and taps from another, plus your own labour rates for fitting, electrics, plumbing and waste. Each has its own price file format, its own update cycle and its own way of telling you.
| Price source | How it usually updates | Where it gets lost |
|---|---|---|
| Units and doors | New price list a few times a year | Emailed file not loaded into the pricing sheet |
| Worktops | Priced per job from the fabricator | Estimate used, final price different |
| Appliances | Frequent changes and promotions | Looked up once and not rechecked |
| Your labour rates | Changed when you decide | Old rates still in someone's template |
What stale prices do to your margin
Kitchens are high value and your margin on each one is the difference between a lot of moving parts. A small increase across the unit list, missed for a couple of months, is enough to turn a good job into a thin one. You usually find out at year end, or when the accountant asks why gross margin fell, by which point the jobs are long finished.
What we build for pricing
- A price library that imports each supplier's price file, whether it arrives as a spreadsheet, CSV or PDF, and records the date it takes effect.
- Your markup rules and labour rates set centrally, per supplier and per product type, so designers do not keep their own copies.
- A quote builder that takes the schedule exported from your design software and prices each line from the current library.
- A staleness check: any line priced from a list that has since been replaced, or any appliance price older than the limit you set, is flagged before the quote is sent.
- A margin view on each quote showing cost, sell and margin by section, so a manager can see thin quotes before they go out.
- When an order is finally placed, the actual supplier price is compared with the quoted cost, and differences are listed.
PDF price lists are read with AI extraction and checked by a person before the new prices go live. Nothing reaches the library without a check.
What your designers and managers see
Designers build quotes from prices they can trust, without hunting through emails. A new price list, once loaded, reaches every new quote that day. Managers see the margin before the quote leaves the building, not after the job is fitted. And the gap between quoted cost and ordered cost becomes visible job by job.
We usually start with the supplier whose price changes hurt most, often the unit supplier, and add the others once the first is running cleanly. Designers carry on drawing and presenting exactly as they do now. What changes is where the numbers come from and the warning that appears when one of them is out of date, which is a small change in habit for a large change in how much you can trust a quote.
Tell-tale signs
- Designers keep their own pricing spreadsheets.
- Supplier price updates arrive by email and are loaded when someone gets round to it.
- You have found out about a price rise from an invoice.
- Nobody can say the margin on a quote until the job is finished.
- Appliance prices on quotes are weeks older than the order date.