Somebody retypes the price list for three weeks. Twice a year.

Ask any distributor what happens when a supplier updates its price list. The answer is almost always the same: a file arrives, somebody opens it next to the management system, and starts typing.

Hundreds of suppliers. Thousands of items each. At least twice a year. In a company with a serious catalogue this is weeks of somebody's working life, every year, forever.

Why it survives

Because it is nobody's project. It's too small to justify buying software and too big to finish in an afternoon. It's also seasonal: by the time you're annoyed enough to do something about it, the update is over and you have six months to forget.

And it never appears in a budget, because it's already paid for. It comes out of a salary, not out of a line item.

What it actually costs

• Weeks of a person's time, twice a year, on work that teaches them nothing
• The window in between, where your published prices are last season's — you are selling at a margin you no longer have
• The typing errors: one wrong row is a product sold at the wrong price for months before anyone notices

The third one is the expensive one, and the only one nobody measures.

The obstacle: no two supplier files are the same

The naive version of this project assumes there's a standard file. There isn't. Prices arrive as text with a currency symbol attached. Discounts live in a second sheet. Product codes don't match the ones in your system. And the same supplier will send a different column order next time, without mentioning it.

So the answer isn't one clever importer that reads everything. It's a saved mapping per supplier: this column is the code, that one is the price, discounts are over there. Set up once, reused every time. The first update takes an hour of setup. Every one after that is a run.

The rule that matters more than speed

A bad import that silently changes four thousand prices is far worse than three weeks of typing. Typing is slow, but a human notices when something looks wrong. An import doesn't.

So nothing is written until it has been shown: how many rows will change, which go up, which go down, which codes couldn't be matched to anything. You look at that, then you approve it. Only then does anything get written.

And it never deletes. A product that has disappeared from the supplier's new file gets flagged for a human to look at — it is not removed. Files are incomplete far more often than catalogues shrink.

What it looks like afterwards

The price update becomes an afternoon, most of it spent reading the preview rather than typing. The person who used to do it spends that week doing something a person should be doing.

The goal was never speed. The goal is that the price on your site is the price you meant.