This week, we looked at who actually uses the price rules feature in EStaff Plus. It lets you set, once and for all, how your selling price is calculated: a margin in %, a profit in $, or the manufacturer's suggested retail price (MSRP), by product, by category or by manufacturer.
The result: 70 of our 87 customers don't use it. That's about 80%.
Had we known that resellers calculate faster than our servers, we would never have developed this feature. So we're going to turn it off for the customers who don't use it. After all, they have a calculator.
Thirty seconds isn't long
Find the cost. Remember the margin for that category. Pull out the calculator (the one in Windows, the one on your phone, or a real one). Calculate. That's 30 seconds.
At 50 prices a day, that's 25 minutes a day. Over 250 working days, more than 100 hours a year spent typing numbers the computer already knows. And sometimes you type them in front of the customer.
Lost time isn't the whole story
When the margin isn't written down anywhere, it varies. I used to be that reseller: when the month was going well, I'd give a more aggressive price. After bad news, I'd inflate the price to recover the loss. My margin depended on my mood.
And when an employee can't remember the margin for a category, they fall back on the "default margin." A cable sold for $2 instead of $9.99 is money lost, and in an industry with thin margins, nobody notices.
A configured price rule gives everyone in the company the same price, protects the margin by category and gets rid of the calculator.
When did you last question your processes?
Statistics Canada confirms it: from 2001 to 2021, business-sector labour productivity grew by 0.9% a year in Canada, compared with 2.0% a year in the United States (source). Small losses like this one, repeated every day, are part of the picture. Even if setting up your rules took an hour, you'd earn it back in two or three days.
But the calculator is only one example. The real question is this: which habits are you keeping simply because "that's how we've always done it"? Take the time, regularly, to question your processes and look for ways to improve them. Every minute you win back is a minute for your customers, or for your margin.
