The file is called PriceList_Autumn_FINAL_v3.pdf. It is 41 pages. The supplier sent it on a Thursday afternoon with a one-line email that said prices apply from the 1st.
Somewhere in those 41 pages, about sixty of your products have changed price. Some went up by 3 per cent, a few went down, two have been discontinued and replaced with a new code. Finding them means printing the old list, printing the new one and sitting with a highlighter. Or paying someone to retype 600 lines into a spreadsheet and hoping they do not slip a row.
The system takes the PDF or the Excel file as it arrives, by email or dropped into a folder. It reads the tables, works out which column is the product code, which is the description and which is the trade price, and matches each line to your existing products. Suppliers are not consistent about this. One list has the code in column A, the next has it buried in the description. The matching copes with both.
What comes out is a clean import file in the format your shop expects, Shopify CSV, WooCommerce CSV or whatever your till wants. Next to it is a second sheet with only the changes. Old price, new price, difference in pounds and in per cent, and a flag for anything that looks wrong, like a 40 per cent jump or a code that no longer appears.
You look at the changes sheet. That takes ten minutes instead of an afternoon. You decide what to do with your retail prices, and the import goes in. Discontinued lines get their own short list, so you can mark them out of stock before someone orders one.
This is the kind of thing we build. It runs in your own accounts and your own spreadsheets. When did the last price list come in, and has it actually gone into the shop yet?