PVF pricing never sits still. Steel and copper move pipe and fitting costs. Manufacturers send increase letters on valves, water heaters and fixtures. Job pricing on a big mechanical project gets loaded for a contractor and never comes off. Over a few years, the gap between what you should charge and what you actually charge gets wide, and most of it happens without anyone deciding it should.
The app has four tools aimed at that gap.
Margin leaks: the lines losing money
Margin leaks shows lines sold below cost or below your floor margin, and vendor cost increases that weren't passed on. It's often where the fastest money is.
In PVF, the usual leaks are easy to recognize:
- Project pricing on valves or fittings that stayed on the account after the job closed.
- A manufacturer increase on water heaters or fixtures that changed your cost but not the sell price.
- Pipe priced from an old commodity level and never updated.
- A counter override meant as a one-time favor that became the price.
Fixing these rarely needs a hard customer conversation. It needs someone to notice, and 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 customers would still be paying less than they would elsewhere after a modest increase, so the risk of losing them is low.
The note goes to the rep for a reason. Your rep knows which contractor is fighting for a tight bid and which plant just changed purchasing managers, and can choose when to bring it up or whether to wait.
Micro price increases
Micro price increases are small, half a percent to two percent, every few months. They're too small for most customers to call about, and they add up over two or three years.
They replace the painful annual increase, the one that makes a purchasing manager send everything out to bid, with steady small moves that follow your costs. That's fairer to the customer too, because your costs don't rise once a year. They rise whenever the mill or the manufacturer 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 your reps come across. When a school district, city or water utility posts its plumbing supply award, you can see that pricing and use it.
Public bid awards are especially useful in PVF because so much of the business with schools, cities and utilities is bid. Sometimes the intel shows you have room to raise prices. Sometimes it shows exactly how much to sharpen the pencil on one category to win the bid. Either way, you're working from evidence instead of a hunch.
The order matters. Fix the leaks first, because they cost you money without anyone getting value from it. Move the clearly below-market accounts next, with your reps deciding the timing. Then let small increases keep pace with costs from there on. Live rep commissions straight from invoices let your reps see how margin moves their own pay, which keeps everyone pulling the same way.
See how it works with your own PVF and plumbing catalog.