A restaurant chain sent back an invoice and refused to pay it. The distributor checked and found the quoted price was 12 percent higher than the contract, because a sales rep had picked the wrong price list from an Excel dropdown. For a 30-person beverage wholesaler with 400 customers on different terms, this was not a one-off. It was a weekly event.
The managing director estimated those pricing mistakes cost around $90,000 a year in rebates, disputes, and awkward apologies.
Where the wrong prices were hiding
The ERPNext Consulting team spent a day listening to the sales team, then a day mapping every price rule the company had. There were customer-specific deals, volume discounts, promotional prices for certain products, and different tax rules by region. Each rule lived in someone’s head or in a messy spreadsheet. When a customer complained, the company just credited the difference instead of fixing the root cause.
What they put in place instead
- One price list per customer group, with a validity period, so old deals automatically expire.
- Volume discount rules that step down based on the last 90 days of purchases, not on a promised figure someone forgot.
- A simple approval step for any manual price override, so exceptions leave a trail and get reviewed monthly.
The quiet win nobody expected
Once the first version of the pricing rules went live, a second benefit appeared. Customers stopped calling to negotiate because the invoice matched the quote every time. Dispute emails dropped by more than half, and the finance team stopped spending two hours a week on credit notes. The managing director says the ERPNext Consulting setup paid for itself within the first quarter — not from new sales, but from money that used to leak out the back door.
If you are still approving manual price adjustments by email, start by listing your five biggest customer groups and writing down the exact rule that applies to each. That list is your starting point, and it is exactly how this wholesaler’s fix began. The invoices you send today are a test of how well you know your own pricing.