One price list, forty markets, zero arguments
Pricing lived in spreadsheets per market. We modelled a single price layer with market overrides, versioned and reviewed like code.
- Time to launch a market
- 4 wks
- Markets covered
- 40
- Price files removed
- 96
- Review time
- -70%
The situation
Pricing for forty markets lived in ninety-six spreadsheets. Each market owned its own, each had a local override policy, and reconciling them before a launch took eleven weeks.
Nobody could answer when a price had last changed, or who approved it.
Constraints
Local markets had to keep genuine control over their own overrides. A central price list imposed from head office had been tried once and quietly ignored.
What we did
One base price model with market overrides expressed as data, versioned and reviewed like code. Markets keep their autonomy; what changed is that the override is recorded with an author and a date.
Launching a market is now a configuration change rather than a reconciliation project.
The unexpected benefit
The audit trail settled arguments that had been running for years. Pricing disputes per quarter fell from 23 to 3, mostly because the history answered the question before anyone escalated.
Results
| Measure | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Spreadsheets in use | 96 | 0 |
| Time to launch a new market | 11 wks | 4 wks |
| Pricing disputes per quarter | 23 | 3 |
| Audit trail | None | Full history |
What we left behind
- A project in the client's own repository, with tests and CI
- Documented definitions with named owners
- Runbooks for every scheduled job, written for a non-engineer
- Two weeks of training for the team taking it over
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Tell us which number you cannot trust
Send one paragraph about the report that always starts an argument. A data lead, not a salesperson, replies within one business day.