The quote was right when it was written
An account manager builds a quote for sixty seats and a support add-on from the price file on the shared drive. The customer takes three weeks to raise a purchase order. When the order goes to the distributor, the cost on the order confirmation is higher than the cost on the quote. The vendor moved its price list at the start of the month, and nobody refreshed the file.
The customer has a PO at the quoted price. You can absorb the difference, or you can go back to them with a revised quote and explain why.
Some teams have two or three versions of the same price file floating around, named with dates or initials, and the choice of which one to use is whoever opened the folder last.
Why cost prices go stale
Software prices move more often than people expect. Vendors adjust list prices, change currency conversion for sterling price books, retire product codes and add new bundles. Distributors publish updated files, sometimes monthly, sometimes more often, and sometimes with changes buried in a file of tens of thousands of lines.
The problem is the step between the distributor's current price and your quote. It is manual, it happens occasionally, and there is nothing on the quote that tells anyone how old the cost was.
| Step | Where it slips |
|---|---|
| Download price file | Done occasionally, by whoever remembers |
| Find the product code | Retired or renamed codes still used |
| Copy cost into quote | Typing errors, wrong term or tier |
| Add margin | Spreadsheet formula copied from an older quote |
| Quote validity | Validity period not tied to the cost date |
What the stale price costs you
Margin is the obvious casualty: every price rise between quote and order comes out of your side unless you renegotiate. The less obvious cost is the conversation with the customer, who reasonably asks why the price they approved is no longer the price.
Product codes are a second source of pain. An order placed with a retired code bounces back from the distributor, and the fix happens under time pressure, sometimes at quarter end when everything is busy.
The quoting flow we put in place
- Price loading: distributor price data is loaded on a schedule, by API or feed where your distributor offers one, or from the files they publish, into a single price table with the date it was loaded.
- Change detection: each load is compared with the last, and price changes, new codes and retired codes are listed so your team can see what moved without reading the file.
- Line pricing: quote lines are priced from the current table by product code, term and tier, with your margin rules applied per vendor or product family.
- Cost date on the quote: every quote records the cost date for each line, and the validity period you set is tied to it.
- Pre-order check: before an order is placed, each line's cost is rechecked against current pricing, and any difference is shown to the account manager before the order goes out.
- Retired code warning: quotes containing codes that no longer appear in the distributor data are flagged with the likely replacement, for a person to confirm.
This can sit inside your existing quoting tool if it has an API, or be a small quoting service that writes quotes back to your CRM.
How quoting feels afterwards
Account managers stop hunting for the latest price file. They pick products, the cost is filled in from current data, and the margin is calculated as the quote is built. When a customer's PO arrives weeks later, the system tells them straight away whether cost has moved, so the decision to absorb or requote is made before the order, not after it.
Your operations team gets a short weekly list of price changes that affect open quotes, which is more useful than a new file of forty thousand rows.
Is your team quoting from old files?
- Several versions of the same distributor price file sit on the shared drive.
- Order confirmations regularly show a higher cost than the quote.
- Orders bounce back because a product code was retired.
- Quotes do not show when their cost prices were taken.
- Margin on a quote is worked out in a separate spreadsheet.