Price monitoring does not have to mean watching competitors. A register of every product line you have bought and sold, with its price per unit, rebuilt from past invoices, shows how your own costs and prices move and lets you quote from the last price.
Two kinds of price monitoring
Price monitoring comes in two kinds: watching what other businesses charge, and tracking what you yourself have paid and charged over time.
Competitor price monitoring means collecting the prices other sellers publish, usually from websites, and comparing them with yours. It is common in online retail, where prices are public and change often. Market price analysis is the broader version: looking at where prices for a product or material are heading across a whole market.
The second kind gets far less attention, but for most businesses that buy and sell to other businesses it is more useful. Your own invoices already hold every price you have paid each supplier and every price you have charged each customer. Put in order, that is a price history tracker built from facts rather than from somebody else's website.
We should say plainly what we do and do not do. We do not scrape competitor prices or watch other businesses' websites. What we run today is the second kind: a register of every product line ever bought and sold, with its price per unit, rebuilt from past invoices and kept up to date automatically.
| Competitor price monitoring | Price history from your own invoices | |
|---|---|---|
| Source | Prices other sellers publish | Your own purchase and sales invoices |
| What it answers | What are others charging today? | What did we pay and charge, and how has it moved? |
| Works best for | Public prices that change often | Negotiated prices, trade customers, repeat products |
| Accuracy | Depends on what is published and when | Exactly what was invoiced |
| Used for | Positioning your public prices | Quoting, checking supplier increases, protecting margin |
Building a history from invoices
A price history is built by reading every past invoice, line by line, into one register with the date, the customer or supplier, the product, the quantity, the unit and the price.
Most businesses already have the raw material: sales invoices in the accounting system and supplier invoices as PDFs in a mailbox or a folder. The work is in reading them consistently. Product names drift over the years, the same item is described three different ways, and units change from one supplier to the next.
The route we follow looks like this.
- Collect the invoices: sales invoices from the accounting system, supplier invoices from the mailbox and the archive folders.
- Read each invoice line: date, customer or supplier, product description, quantity, unit and price.
- Match each line to one product in a product list, so that different descriptions of the same item land in the same place.
- Convert every price to a price per unit on a common unit of measure.
- Write each line to the register, marked as bought or sold, with a link back to the invoice it came from.
- Flag lines that cannot be read or matched exactly for a person to check, instead of guessing.
Price per unit and units of measure
Prices can only be compared when they are expressed per the same unit, so every line in the register is converted to one price per unit.
This is where many homemade price lists go wrong. One supplier invoices by the box of twelve, another by the single item; one by the kilo, another by the metric ton; one quotes a delivered price, another charges transport on a separate line. Compared as they stand, the numbers mean nothing.
A sound register keeps both: the original line exactly as invoiced, and the converted price per unit next to it. That way anyone can check the conversion against the invoice.
- Choose one base unit per product, such as per item, per kilo or per meter, and stick to it.
- Record the conversion used for each pack size or alternative unit.
- Keep transport, surcharges and discounts on their own lines so they do not distort the unit price.
- Note the currency of every line, and do not mix currencies in one comparison.
- Keep the original description as invoiced, alongside the matched product name.
Using it to quote
The most practical use of a price history is quoting from the last price: when a customer asks again, you see at once what you charged them, and what the item cost you, last time.
Without a history, a repeat quote often means searching old emails or asking whoever handled the last order. With one, the answer is a single filtered view: this customer, this product, the last few prices and dates, and beside them your latest purchase price for the same item.
That makes quotes faster, and it makes them more consistent. Two people quoting the same customer for the same product should not land on different prices by accident. It also protects the margin: if your purchase price has risen since the last sale, the register shows it before you repeat an old selling price.
Our price history is used exactly this way today, for quoting from the last price. Turning that into a quote, ready for your approval, is work we build to order on the same engine.
A practical tip: when you quote from history, note the date of the last price beside it. A price from last month and a price from two years ago are not the same kind of starting point.
How has one product's price moved?
Pick one product you buy regularly. Enter the price per unit you paid on three past invoices, oldest first, in the same currency and the same unit. The result uses only your numbers.
Spotting supplier increases
Because every purchase line is in one place, a supplier's price increase shows up as a step in that product's history, even when nobody announced it.
Increases often arrive quietly: a new price list attached to an email nobody opened, a surcharge that becomes permanent, a pack size that shrinks while the price stays put. When invoices are entered one by one, these changes are easy to miss. When the price per unit sits on a line over time, they are hard to miss.
The calculator on this page does the simplest version of this check with your own numbers. Enter the price per unit from three past purchases of one product, oldest first, and it shows how much the price has moved from the first to the latest purchase, and in which direction.
What it does not do is tell you why. A higher price can be a fair reflection of the market, a new specification, or a mistake on the invoice. That judgment, and any conversation with the supplier, stays with you.
Keeping it current
A price history is only useful if it stays current, so each new invoice should be added to the register as soon as it is issued or received.
Rebuilding the past is a one-time job; keeping up is a routine. Ours is kept up to date automatically: as new sales invoices are created and new supplier invoices arrive, their lines are read, matched and added to the register, and anything that cannot be matched exactly is passed to a person.
It runs on our servers against your own accounts, and the register lives in your own sheet, so the history is yours whatever happens. The service is rented monthly, at one figure per workflow stated in the quote; if the rental stops, the updates stop, and the register you already have stays where it is.
Two habits keep the history honest. First, when a new product appears, decide its base unit at once instead of letting it drift. Second, glance at the lines flagged for checking each week, so a small mismatch does not turn into a gap in your price monitoring.
What it does not do
Price monitoring from your own invoices is a record of facts, not a forecast, and it does not set prices for you.
It is worth being clear about the limits before you rely on it. The register shows what was invoiced; it cannot see a discount agreed by phone and never written down, or a price a supplier offered that you did not take. It shows your trend, not the whole market's.
It also does not change anything by itself. It does not edit your price lists, alter a quote or write to a supplier. Every decision about what to charge, and every conversation about what you pay, stays with a person.
Within those limits, it answers the questions that come up every week: what did we charge this customer last time, what did this item cost us, and when did that change? For many businesses, that is the price monitoring that actually gets used.
Questions
What is price monitoring?
It is tracking how prices change over time. It can mean watching what competitors publish, or tracking what you yourself have paid and charged, product by product, from your own invoices.
Do you monitor competitor prices?
No. We do not scrape or watch other businesses' websites. What we run is a price history built from your own purchase and sales invoices.
What is a price history tracker?
A register that records each price paid or charged for a product, with the date, the customer or supplier and the unit, so you can see how the price has moved and quote from the last one.
How far back should a price history go?
As far back as your invoices are readable and still relevant. Older lines are useful to see the trend; the most recent ones matter most for quoting.
Can a price history tell me what the market price is?
Only for what you have bought and sold. It shows your own prices exactly; for a view of the wider market you would combine it with other sources.
Tell us your workflow. We will build it around you.
Write to [email protected] with the number of products you buy and sell and the hours you spend looking up past prices, and we will tell you plainly whether a price history fits.
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