The contract says one price. The ERP says another. In between sit the email where the discount was negotiated, the spreadsheet where someone recalculated, and the person who happens to remember what was promised — and nobody sees the gap until the invoice has gone out.
For mid-sized manufacturers and distributors — thousands of items, customer-specific prices, and no dedicated pricing function.
A worked example, not a customer reference. A wholesaler with SEK 400 million in revenue, a 24 per cent gross margin and customer-specific prices across 14,000 customer-and-item combinations. Every line is calculated from counts — substitute your own and the structure holds.
| Item | How it arises | Per year |
|---|---|---|
| Index adjustments that never happen | Someone has to fetch the right index figure for the right base month and enter it before a given date. Miss it and the old price stands.12 % of SEK 250m contract volume × 3.1 % adjustment | SEK 930,000 |
| Time-limited prices that stay on | Campaigns and volume discounts get an end date no system watches. The price applies until someone happens to notice.48 rows (8 % of 600) × SEK 180k volume × 6 % discount depth | SEK 520,000 |
| Price lists that disagree | The customer price list, the campaign list and the contract price can all be valid at once. The system picks one — not always the right one.210 rows (1.5 % of 14,000) × SEK 120k volume × 2.4 % deviation | SEK 600,000 |
| The admin around the prices | Price changes are prepared, approved and entered by hand — plus price queries from sales and customers, and credit notes after the fact.1,500 hours/year, 60 % of which falls away × SEK 480/hour | SEK 430,000 |
| Total, per year | SEK 2,480,000 | |
0.6 per cent of revenue — and a little over ten per cent of operating profit at a six per cent operating margin. Every year, until corrected.
Not all of it can be recovered. Some deviations you will leave standing — the customer relationship outweighs forty thousand kronor. The difference is that it becomes a decision rather than an accident.
Halve every assumption and it still lands at SEK 1.2 million a year — several times what the review and the implementation cost together. The order of magnitude is not controversial: Marn and Rosiello showed in Harvard Business Review that a one per cent price improvement lifts operating profit by eleven per cent on average (Managing Price, Gaining Profit, 1992). The price lines above amount to half of one.
80 per cent is already built and tested — the engine, the comparison, the approval flow, the interface. The remaining 20 is your process: your approval order, your margin targets, what your contracts and price lists actually look like, and which source outranks which at your company.
| Part | What it does |
|---|---|
| The contract reader | Reads your customer contracts — appendices, quotes and emails too — and picks out the prices, discounts and terms you have actually agreed. |
| The ERP connection | Retrieves the prices in the system, continuously as they change, so the contract and reality can be set against each other. |
| The comparison | Sets contract against contract, contracts against the system’s price lists, and the price lists against each other. Shows not only where a single price differs, but also which contracts contradict each other, where the customer price list and a campaign list give different prices for the same item, which lists have drifted from the contracts, and which agreed items have no price in the system at all. |
| The ruling | The order of precedence you set resolves most conflicts automatically. Where it is not enough, you decide — and choose whether the decision applies just this once or stands for the future. So “what have we actually agreed with this customer?” gets an answer that stays. Where it was the price list in the system that was wrong, the correction goes on for approval and is entered into the ERP. |
| The approval | Every deviation goes to the right person by amount and customer class — you set the limits yourselves. The decision is to adjust the price or keep it with a stated reason, and the log of who, when and why cannot be rewritten afterwards. |
| The update | Enters the approved prices into the ERP, so nobody has to key them in by hand. New price lists take the same route, through approval. |
| The clean-up | Removes expired contract prices and campaigns, so they do not live on and get used by mistake. |
| The monitoring | Keeps watch continuously and gets in touch when something new needs deciding — an index date that has passed, a price that has expired, an approval that was never entered. |
No price is changed in the ERP without someone at your company approving it — the flow proposes, you decide.
Everything the flow finds gathers in one place — deviations, lines that need review, and cases awaiting approval.
| Customer | Item | Contract | In the system | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nordvik Industri AB | ART-4021 | 1 310.00 | 1 240.00 | −70.00 |
| Index adjustment never carried out | ||||
| Bergslagens Maskin AB | ART-1188 | 847.00 | 890.00 | +43.00 |
| Contract discount missing from the price list | ||||
| Nordvik Industri AB | ART-3355 | — | 980.00 – 1 095.00 | 115.00 |
| Campaign price overrides the customer price list — two valid lists give different prices | ||||
“Prices are adjusted annually on 1 January according to Statistics Sweden’s producer price index for industry, with October of the previous year as the base month.” — Nordvik Industri AB, framework agreement 2024-03-11, clause 6.2
| Product group | Margin | Target | Deviation |
|---|---|---|---|
| Transmission | 23.1% | 25% | −1.9 |
| Hydraulics | 29.8% | 28% | +1.8 |
| Spare parts | 31.2% | 34% | −2.8 |
| Tools | 30.4% | 28% | +2.4 |
| Date | Customer | Decision | By | Reason |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2026-08-24 | Kvarnbergs Trä AB | Price adjusted | Anna Lind, sales manager | Index clause 4.1 applied |
| 2026-08-21 | Nordvik Industri AB | Exception documented | Per Sjögren, CEO | Q4 volume commitment, deviation approved until year end |
| 2026-08-19 | Bergslagens Maskin AB | Price adjusted | Anna Lind, sales manager | Discount tiers per appendix 2 |
No new integration with the ERP. If there is an API, we use it. If there is none, we use standard exports — and where neither works, a robot that does what a person would otherwise have done by hand. Everything runs in a Microsoft environment.
SharePoint, OneDrive or a shared mailbox. No clean-up, no restructuring, no new system to fill in.
Standard exports from the ERP are enough to get started. A deeper connection only once the flow has proved itself — and only if you want one.
Margin targets, who may approve what, and which source outranks which at your company. That is the 20 per cent — and it is set once.
A review of a sample of contracts first, so the scope is known before anything is built. Then implementation in two to four weeks.
Get in touch and we will take it from there. A short call is enough to understand how you work today — who approves what, where the contracts live, and what the ERP does with the prices. That picture is what decides how the last 20 per cent should look at your company.