One of the biggest challenges in product range planning is keeping pricing information up-to-date and accessible. Distributors and resellers need a quick, easy way to access pricing information while remaining confident that the numbers are accurate. For this reason, most companies create price books.
Price books make it simple for distributors and resellers to find pricing info — and ensure that your brand’s quality standards are upheld across all stores. Automating the price book process makes a huge difference in decreasing the time and resources spent on manually processing price books.
With the right price book automation tools, your business can see higher sales, more revenue, and in turn, increased production.
What are price books?
A price book is basically a spreadsheet of all of your products, their prices, and the dates on which you raised or lowered your prices. It’s a great way to get an idea of how much your products are selling for and how often you’re changing your prices.
Sometimes your price books will differ per distributor/customer – it can depend on who is buying when they are buying, or in what quantity. This means that you will have different price books for different sectors and countries.
Why automate them?
Price books are nothing new, and they might seem like an outdated relic from a bygone age. However, the truth is that price books — and the ability to quickly track prices on every product in your store — can improve your efficiency and bottom line.
Price book automation frees up your time, meaning you can spend less to run your online store. Updates like price changes take only a few clicks to set up, and it could save you hours of manual work every month. Automation lets you focus on other parts of your business, like customer service, sales, marketing, and more.
So, if you are still using (and struggling) with Excel spreadsheets in setting up your price books, here is how automating price books aid enterprise growth.
Limit human error
Product prices are automatically updated and tracked with an automated price book. Studies find that 9 out of 10 Excel spreadsheets (88%) contain errors. Most of these problems are caused by human error and are completely avoidable. When it comes to automated price books, the potential for human error is gone. Maintaining everything digitally eliminates manual processes.
Up-to-date prices
Have you gotten into an argument with a distributor because they insist that a product’s old price is what they’re going to pay? You end up with a headache and a dissatisfied client, which is never a good combination. Prices are kept up to date by automated price books, ensuring that your distributors and resellers have instant access to updated information/prices in which case you avoid unpleasant encounters.
Invoice accuracy
Automated price books are a great way to ensure the accuracy of your invoices. They can prevent mistakes (especially those made by accounting teams spread across multiple locations) that can cost you money. Invoices that aren’t processed correctly don’t just affect your ability to pay vendors — they can cause a lot of customer dissatisfaction, too. Automated price books can fix these problems before they happen — businesses can maintain transparency and accuracy across their entire inventory and invoices.
Share & modify price books instantly
You can edit or update digital price books at any time, for specific distributors, resellers, or products. Also, you shorten communication cycles by giving your distributors and resellers instant access to your price books. With an accurate automated price book in place, your business will flourish.
Conclusion
Manage channel sales more efficiently and upgrade your performance with price books. The UCX Platform includes the price book feature by default, and you can use it to: create price books for distributors and resellers, adapt wholesale prices for specific price books, assign different prices for different products, and more.
Book a demo and learn how you can get your price books automated!