How to read a supplier invoice without missing a price rise

A glance isn't a check

Most invoices get a glance: does the total look roughly right, is the delivery address correct, file it. That's enough to catch a wildly wrong invoice, but it's not enough to catch the far more common case: forty lines that are all correct except one, priced 6% higher than last time, sitting in the middle of the page where nothing draws the eye to it.

Three ways price creep hides in plain sight

• The unit changes, not just the number. A price that looks unchanged, or even lower, can be quietly repriced per box instead of per unit, or per metre instead of per length. The number on the page means nothing until you've checked what it's the price of.
• Small rises don't trigger a second look. A part that doubled in price gets noticed. A part that crept up 4%, then 3% the invoice after, rarely does, and by the time it's up 15% overall, nobody remembers what it used to cost.
• Surcharges get folded into the unit price. A fuel surcharge or a small-order fee sometimes shows as its own line, and sometimes gets spread across the unit prices instead, so the same increase looks like a normal price rise rather than a one-off charge worth querying.

A short checklist before you re-quote a repeat job

• Compare against the last invoice, not memory. "That's about what it usually costs" is exactly how a small rise gets waved through.
• Check the unit before the number. Each, pack, metre, box: confirm it matches what you priced last time, not just that a price is present.
• Treat your highest-volume parts as worth a proper check every time. The part you buy every week is the one where a small rise compounds fastest across a month of jobs.

Where automatic price reading closes the gap

All three of those are habits worth having regardless of what software you run. What they don't fix is the time cost of doing them on every invoice, for every part, every week. CostBase reads each invoice automatically and checks every matched part against what it cost last time. If a price has moved more than 10%, it flags it the moment the invoice lands, instead of relying on someone noticing a number that looks about right.