The price is a stack, not a number #
In most trade suppliers the price a customer pays is assembled at the moment of asking out of several layers, and any of them can be the one that applies.
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List price
The published number almost nobody actually pays.
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Band or category discount
A percentage off by customer group, product group, or both.
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Customer specific pricing
Lines negotiated individually, often years ago, often by somebody no longer at the business.
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Contract or project pricing
A price that holds for one job, one site or one period, and should expire.
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Promotion
A supplier funded deal live this month, which may or may not stack with the above.
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Break quantity
A different unit price at a case, a pallet or a layer.
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Carriage
Free over a threshold, charged under it, waived for some accounts by habit.
Every one of those is a lookup. None of them requires judgement. What requires judgement is the decision sitting on top: whether to go under the entitled price to win this particular order.
Why the same customer gets two different prices #
Inconsistency is the real symptom, and it is almost always caused by the stack rather than by carelessness. Two people quoting the same customer on the same day can reach different numbers honestly, because one applied the band and the other found the customer specific line, or because one knew the promotion was live and the other did not.
The cost of that is not the margin on one order. It is that the customer learns to shop the quote internally, ringing until they get the person who quotes lowest, and that your own people start hedging: quoting cautiously high to avoid being wrong, then discounting under pressure.
This is also why availability and price arrive in the same message. A customer asking whether you have got it in stock almost always asks what it costs in the same breath, so what looks like one enquiry is two lookups against two different sets of rules.
What a quote commits you to #
A quote is an offer, and once it is accepted the price is the price. Three things follow that are easy to get wrong when quotes are produced ad hoc from a mailbox.
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Expiry
A quote with no stated validity period is a standing invitation to hold you to a number after your own cost has moved. Where a supplier price changes monthly, an unexpired quote from March is a live liability.
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Traceability
When the order arrives against a quote, somebody has to find the quote. If quotes live in individual mailboxes, that search costs more than the quote did, and the version that surfaces may not be the last one sent.
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Carrying through to the invoice
GOV.UK sets out what an invoice must carry, and VAT records generally have to be kept for at least six years. If the quote does not hold enough detail to become that document, the detail is reconstructed later by somebody with less context.
What GOV.UK says an invoice must carry
A unique identification number, both parties' details, a clear description, the supply date, the invoice date, the amounts, VAT where it applies and the total owed.
One thing you may not do #
Suppliers sometimes try to protect a customer's margin by telling them what to sell at. The Competition and Markets Authority is direct about where the line falls.
- A recommended resale price, as guidance, provided the retailer is genuinely free to ignore it and there is no threat or incentive attached
- Resale price maintenance, where a supplier requires a retailer not to resell below a specified price. This is unlawful
- Restricting how far a customer can discount
- Tying their price to what a competitor charges
It matters here because pricing rules written into a quote template are durable in a way that a phone conversation is not. Whatever your pricing logic is, it becomes visible once it is written down, which is usually an argument for writing it down.
Which parts run on rules #
Runs on rules
- Identifying which account is asking
- Resolving a loose product description to a code
- Applying the price that account is entitled to
- Applying pack size, break quantity and carriage rules
- Checking whether a live promotion applies
- Producing the same document every time, with an expiry date
- Finding the quote again when the order lands
Finding the quote again only works if it was filed anywhere findable.
Needs a person
- Going below the entitled price to win the order
- Deciding a customer has earned a better band
- Judging whether a quote is being shopped against you
What to measure before you change anything #
Take twenty recent quotes and record two things for each: how long it took from the request landing to the quote going out, and how many of the seven pricing layers above actually had to be checked.
Then take five customers and ask two people to quote the same basket independently. If the numbers differ, the problem is not the speed of quoting, it is that the pricing policy does not exist anywhere outside people's heads.
Wholesale is a sector of small businesses doing this at volume. There were about 101,000 wholesale businesses registered for VAT or PAYE in the UK in March 2025, 3.7 per cent of 2.73 million, and in most of them the person who prices is also the person who sells.
The quote turnaround tool puts a number on the delay, and the account rules that decide which price applies in the first place are set when the trade account is opened.