Electrical pricing is a moving target. Copper moves wire prices. Manufacturers send increase letters on gear, devices and lighting. Some accounts get special pricing for a job and keep it long after the job is done. Over a few years, the gap between what you should be charging and what you actually charge can get wide, and most of it goes unnoticed.
The app has four tools that work on that gap.
Margin leaks: find the lines losing money
Margin leaks shows lines sold below cost or below your floor margin, and vendor cost increases that were not passed on. This is often where the quickest money is.
In electrical, the usual suspects are easy to picture:
- Job pricing on a breaker or fixture line that never came off when the job ended.
- A manufacturer increase on devices or boxes that updated your cost but not the customer's price.
- Wire priced from an old copper level and never adjusted.
- A counter override that was meant to be a one-time favor.
None of these require a hard conversation with a customer to fix. They require someone noticing. The app does the noticing.
Priced below market
Priced below market shows accounts that are priced below the large national distributors, with a suggested 2 to 5 percent increase and a note to the rep. These are customers who would likely not leave over a modest increase, because they would still be paying less than they would elsewhere.
The note to the rep matters. Your rep knows which contractor is in the middle of a tough bid and which plant just got a new purchasing manager. They can decide when and how to bring it up, or whether to wait.
Micro price increases
Micro price increases are small increases, half a percent to two percent, every few months. They are too small for most customers to call about, and they add up over two or three years.
The idea is to replace one painful annual increase, the kind that sends a purchasing manager out to bid, with a steady series of small ones that track your costs. It's more honest to the customer, too, because your costs don't go up once a year. They go up whenever the manufacturer or the copper market says so.
Competitor pricing intel
Competitor pricing intel collects what the large national distributors give off list on public bids, along with photos and PDFs of competitor quotes and bid sheets that your reps find. When a school district or a city posts its electrical supply award, that pricing becomes something you can see and use.
That helps in both directions. Sometimes it shows you have room to raise prices. Sometimes it shows exactly how much you need to sharpen a pencil on a specific category to win a bid. Either way, you are working from evidence instead of a guess.
The point of all four tools is the same: raise gross profit without losing accounts. Fix what is leaking first, then move the accounts that are clearly below market, then let small increases keep pace with costs. Live rep commissions come straight from invoices, so reps can see how margin moves their own pay, which helps keep everyone pulling in the same direction.
See how it works with your own electrical catalog.