Cost Changes and Bulk Editing
How to find items that moved on cost, reprice them with the full picture in front of you, and update many accounts at once.
Overview
Cost Changes is the workhorse of Price Management, and usually the first place a rep starts. It surfaces everything across your portfolio that changed cost over a recent window, so you can see the week's ups and downs and get ahead of them in one sitting. Many reps make it a Friday habit, when they are writing fewer orders and have time to set prices before the week ahead.
For most distributors the window is the last week. It is configurable.
Reading the list
At the top level you see every item that moved on cost, with the data you need to decide where to focus. By default the list sorts by the largest negative impact to your gross profit, so the items costing you the most margin sit at the top.
You can sort by any column header instead, for example to see where you are doing the most volume, where cost moved the most, or where you have increased or decreased the most.
You can also shape the table to fit how you work. Use the configuration tool to toggle columns on or off and drag them into the order you want. Any column Pepper exposes, like your current cost or the last gross margin you charged, can be turned on and moved around.
Digging into an item
Click into an item to see every customer who buys it or has it on their order guide, with the history you need to price it well:
Orders over the last six weeks. A bar for each week shows whether a customer orders steadily or in a more spotty pattern.
Recent invoices. Hover over a price or margin cell to see up to the last five invoices for that customer and item: the price they paid and the quantity. Click into the margin cell to see the margin on those invoices too.
Average weekly volume. An average over the last 12 weeks, so you know how much volume the item does for that customer.
The peer range column
If your distributor has peer range live, this column shows the range of margins across a customer's peer set for the item, and where that customer lands. Sitting low in the range is a sign you have headroom to move up. Sitting at the top is a sign to ease off before you get caught speeding. (See: How Peer Range Benchmarking Works.)
Editing line by line
To reprice a single customer's item, make the change right in the price or margin cell. The old value shows below and the updated value appears in the cell, so you can work down the list one item at a time.
Editing in bulk
When a change should apply to many accounts, you do not have to edit them one by one. Select all accounts, or pick a subset, for example the locations of a multi-unit operator or a group of accounts you want kept in line with each other. Then set either:
A consistent price: every selected account gets the same price on the item.
A consistent margin: every selected account gets the same margin, and Pepper works out each price from that account's cost.
The change applies across everything you selected at once.
Quick actions
Quick actions handle the small, high-frequency moves. They are available on each editable cell and from a keyboard shortcut, and are most useful right after a cost change when you want clean numbers across a batch:
Round up: rounds the price up to the nearest number ending in 9. For example, $5.11 becomes $5.19.
Random round up: rounds the price up to a random number between the current price and the top of the dollar.
A small round-up across many items can add up to a meaningful gross profit impact.
Publishing your changes
Nothing commits until you review your draft and hit publish. When you publish, your changes save as overrides in Pepper and export back to your ERP, which stays the source of truth. (See Using the Pricing Agent for the publish confirmation step, which works the same way here.)
