A price rise that nobody passed on
Your veterinary wholesaler raises the cost of a commonly dispensed product, say a flea and worm treatment you sell every day or a long-term medication for arthritic dogs. The change is in a monthly price file, or a notice email, or just on the next invoice. Your practice management system still sells it at the old price, calculated from the old cost.
Months later, someone looking at margins notices the line barely makes anything. Other lines have moved too, some up and some down. Nobody knows how many, because checking thousands of lines by hand is not something anyone has done.
The opposite happens too. A product's cost falls, the selling price stays where it was, and your price looks high next to the online retailers that owners compare you with. That is a quiet reason owners start asking for written prescriptions.
Why prices drift
Wholesaler costs change often, across thousands of lines, and the changes arrive in formats built for the wholesaler rather than for your system. Updating selling prices in the practice management system is manual unless the system imports price files, and many practices either do not have that feature or do not trust it.
Pricing rules, such as the markup by category, rounding to a sensible figure, and minimum dispensing fees, are in someone's head or an old document. Different people have set prices at different times, so similar products have inconsistent margins.
Buying group deals and rebates complicate it further. The cost on the invoice may not be the cost you actually pay by the end of the year, and your pricing rules need to reflect the one you have decided to use.
What stale prices cost
| Issue | Effect |
|---|---|
| Selling below intended margin | Lost margin on every dispense of that line |
| Inconsistent pricing | Similar products priced very differently |
| Manual updates | Hours spent adjusting lines one by one |
| Unclear rules | Nobody sure how a price was set |
| Client questions | Prices change in jumps when someone finally notices |
Your pricing decisions are yours. We make the gaps visible and apply the changes you approve.
A price check with approval
- Wholesaler price data read from price files, order interfaces or electronic invoices.
- Your pricing rules written down with you: markup by category, rounding, minimum prices and which cost to use where rebates apply.
- Comparison of each line's current cost with your current selling price under those rules.
- A review list of lines that break your rules, sorted by how often they are dispensed, so the lines that matter most come first.
- Approved updates applied to your practice management system by import where it allows, or as a clean list for manual entry where it does not.
- A monthly report of cost changes and margin by category.
Prices that follow costs
When a cost changes, the line appears on the review list within days, not months. You approve, and the price is updated. Margins stay where you intended, and similar products end up priced consistently because the same rules apply to all of them.
Clients see smaller, more regular price changes rather than sudden jumps. And when the partners ask how prices are set, there is a written answer.
Are your prices drifting?
- Wholesaler price changes are not checked systematically
- Selling prices are updated by hand, one line at a time
- You have found lines sold below your intended margin
- Pricing rules are not written down
- You do not know when prices were last reviewed