Three price files in one week
In the same week, your main wholesaler emails a spreadsheet of cost changes across its range, a dry food brand sends a PDF announcing a price rise from next month, and the aquatics supplier updates prices on its portal without saying which lines changed. The owner prints the PDF, highlights the lines you stock and plans to go through the till on Sunday.
Sunday gets busy. Two weeks later, invoices arrive at the new costs while the till still sells at the old prices. Some shelf labels were updated, some were not, and one popular food is now earning very little per bag because its cost went up and its price did not.
Why prices fall behind costs
Pet shops carry thousands of lines from many suppliers, and each supplier's product codes and file formats are different. Matching a supplier's line to your till product is the hard part, and doing it by hand for a price change of hundreds of lines is a job nobody can finish in an evening.
- Supplier files arrive in different formats, including PDFs.
- Supplier codes do not match your till codes directly.
- Price rises are announced ahead but applied late in the till.
- Shelf labels are updated separately, by hand.
- Nobody sees margin by line until a stock or margin review, if ever.
What lagging prices cost
Every day a line sells at an old price after its cost has risen, you lose margin, and on fast selling food lines that adds up quickly. When prices are finally updated in a rush, some go up by more than necessary and shelf labels do not match the till, which confuses customers.
The owner's time is spent on data entry rather than deciding prices, and the decisions that matter, such as absorbing a rise on a key line to keep regulars, are made in a hurry or not at all.
A price update tool for every supplier file
- Supplier price files are sent to a shared inbox or uploaded, whatever the format. Spreadsheets are read directly; PDFs are extracted with an AI step and checked by a person.
- Each supplier line is matched to your till product by barcode, supplier code or a mapping we build once and keep.
- New costs are compared with current prices, and your pricing rules, such as a target margin by category and rounding to your price points, propose new retail prices.
- The owner reviews proposed changes on one screen, sorted by impact, and accepts, adjusts or holds each one.
- Approved changes are sent to the till on the effective date, and a batch of shelf labels is printed for the lines that changed.
- A margin report shows lines where cost has risen but price was held, so those decisions stay visible.
| Step | By hand | With the price tool |
|---|---|---|
| Reading the file | Printed and highlighted | Read or extracted automatically |
| Matching lines | Searching the till | Mapped once, reused |
| New prices | Worked out line by line | Proposed from your rules |
| Till update | Typed in, often late | Applied on the effective date |
| Shelf labels | Some updated | Printed for every change |
Pricing decisions stay with you. The tool proposes; you approve. Extracted PDF data is always checked before it is used.
Price changes handled in an hour, not a weekend
When the wholesaler's spreadsheet arrives, the owner opens the tool, sees the lines that affect you and the proposed prices, and approves most of them in one go. A handful of key foods are held at their current price on purpose. The labels print, and the changes go live on the date the new costs apply.
Invoices and till prices move together, and the owner can see at any time which lines are earning less than the target, and why.
Are supplier price rises getting ahead of you?
- Supplier price files arrive as PDFs and spreadsheets.
- Till prices are updated weeks after costs change.
- Shelf labels and till prices disagree after a price change.
- Some lines earn far less than you thought.
- Price updates take a whole evening or weekend.