The good news is if you want to get anywhere at within pricing in the early days, you’ll have a handful of Excel files in place.  Which is great. In fact, it’s amazing.

Getting control of your pricing and putting a price framework in place is though. Who wants to run prices by another person and have the time to collect, clean and package the data needed for better pricing? And you did it.

And yet …

It probably won’t be enough. 5 Excel files, 50 sheets, whatever the number is. It’s not scalable. In fact, it may seem like you will everything would fall apart if you left the company.

I get it, I’ve been there. In fact, most price managers have. At one point its simply time to leverage up to a price management software and leave the Excel files behind. You will know when.

Sounds familiar? You’re not alone.

That’s why this we put together this blog post to help you out by highlighting 5 of the key benefits of how you can price smarter, by moving away from an Excel-based pricing tool, to a cloud-based price management software such as PriceEdge™.

 

 

1. Say goodbye to person dependency

Spreadsheets are super easy to change, and that’s great – for the person doing the customizing. Sadly, People don’t just change the spreadsheets according to their preferences, but they also base calculations off their own assumptions, without listing those assumptions anywhere. It can be nearly impossible to understand what people meant or did.

Sometimes, this kind of key person dependency only comes to light when urgent adjustments or updates need to be made, and the person is out sick or on vacation. By using a price management system, you avoid this person dependency and have fully documented processes in place and support people to call when needed.

2. No more screwed up formulas

Screwed up formulas in Excel files cause billions of dollars in damages each year. The main culprit for this is most often the lack of built-in controls which makes it easy to change formulas, values, or dependencies without warning.

While the values in a spreadsheet may look reliable, when you dig down under the surface you typically uncover all kinds of horrors – like incorrectly entered formulas, formulas not copied across the right rows and columns, and formulas that simply aren’t right for the desired calculation. By using a price management system, you can block users from changing formulas and rules they shouldn’t and remove losses caused by errors.

3. Do More than just simple cost-plus pricing

Excel is a fantastic tool, but it often struggles when it comes to implementing more advanced pricing methods. If you’re looking to take advantage of applying different pricing strategies across multiple products, customer, and market segments, then a price management software is a must.

By being able to move away from a cost-plus approach, you’re already on the journey to pricing excellence, where your prices are aligned with the perceived value by your customers.

4. Gain speed and security

To really set good prices you need and want to leverage as much relevant data as possible. Sadly, this quickly means more than a million rows of data and a lot of complex joins. Here Excel stops being friendly and quickly gets slow with a tendency to crash from time to time. As a standalone application, not integrated with other business systems, loading new data and updating other systems with new prices also causes a lot of extra work, meaning the pricing can’t be as dynamic as most business want.

Data in excel sheets are rarely kept in a single place – invariably they end up in the hands of the wrong persons. All these problems are easily solved by implementing a price management system such as PriceEdge™.

5. Access full price history when needed

Excel is often just a single snapshot of what is happening now in your pricing world. A price management system logs all the data changes behind the scenes, giving you the power to dig into what drove an old price change to occur when needed.

 

We understand that no two companies are alike, and hence we have designed our price management software with flexibility at the core. That’s why you can configure PriceEdge™ views to fit your needs and tweak and improve how the system should calculate and suggest prices.

So, when you think of your next great pricing idea – like taking advantage of your main competitor being out of stock – you can implement it on the spot and spend the rest of your time working on the next price improvement. If you run out of pricing methods, you can simply use one of the pricing strategies we have preconfigured the system with, including dynamic pricing options, as well as market- and value-based strategies

Learn more about how we do it here

 

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