Price Comparison and price-file approval¶
Price Comparison (menu: Prices & Products → Price Comparison) is a
report that quantifies how a supplier's prices have changed. It runs in two
modes: comparing two price snapshots for a supplier, or comparing an
uploaded price file against the current catalogue — the latter with an
approve/reject step used to sign off a supplier's new price list. It is a
member-only (buying-group) screen.
Compare mode — two snapshots¶
Pick a supplier, then two dates and two price zones, and the report compares the "old" price (first date/zone) against the "new" price (second date/zone). The dropdowns are populated from the supplier's actual price dates and zones, so you can only compare combinations that exist.
Analyse mode — an uploaded price file¶
Starting from a supplier price-list document, the report compares the file's prices against current catalogue data and shows headline tiles — products already in PIM, rows unique to the file, non-active matches, and new products — followed by the same change summary. From here the file can be Approved or Rejected (rejection drafts a notification email back to the supplier). This is the control point for accepting a new price list before it is imported.
The change summary and drill-down¶
Both modes produce a summary table per price zone: counts of price increases, decreases, changes, and no-change, the average % change, and counts of field additions/deletions. Clicking a column opens a drill-down of the individual products behind that number — code (linking to the product record), name, old price, new price, and increase %. A Changes only toggle hides rows whose change is effectively zero. The full comparison can be exported to a spreadsheet (one sheet per price zone).
What is excluded from a comparison¶
- Price-on-application items are excluded.
- Discontinued products and products with a discontinued status are excluded.
- Only zones/dates that exist for the supplier can be selected, so a product priced only in an unselected zone won't appear.
Why do results look wrong or stale¶
- Cached results. A comparison is cached against its parameters (document/dates/zones/supplier); re-running with the same parameters returns the previously computed result until the cache is bypassed with the use cache control.
- Zone mismatch. Choosing zones that few products share yields a thin comparison; the zone dropdowns reflect what the supplier actually has.
- Excluded rows. Missing products are usually price-on-application or discontinued (above).
What it is not¶
- Not a Basket of Goods — that compares suppliers against each other on a hand-built basket, in the browser. Price Comparison compares a supplier against itself over time (or against an uploaded file), server-side.
- Not the importer. Approving a price file here signs it off; loading it into the catalogue is importing product data.