Print a price list and it starts lying the week after you print it. A supplier moves a price, a recipe costed six months ago is quietly wrong, and nobody notices because the printed sheet on the wall still says the old number with total confidence. A price list isn't a document you finish — it's a habit you keep, or it stops being true.
Why the static version fails
A paper or spreadsheet price list captures one moment and then ages in silence. Nobody re-checks it until a recipe cost looks wrong, and by then the gap between the sheet and reality has been open for weeks or months — every dish costed against it during that window carried a wrong number, and every one of those numbers fed a menu price or a margin decision.
What a price list actually needs to track
- Per-unit price, ex-VAT — the only comparable number across suppliers and over time
- The date of that price — so a comparison is against the last real invoice, not a guess
- The supplier — the same ingredient from two suppliers is two different lines, not one average
- Pack size — a case that shrinks from twelve to ten units at the same invoice total is a price increase wearing a disguise
The live version is the honest one
Every price on the list should trace back to the invoice date it came from — not "current," but "as of this delivery." That turns the price list from a snapshot into a history, and a history is what lets you catch a supplier's drift instead of discovering it months later on a P&L, and negotiate from proof instead of a feeling that things got more expensive.
None of this needs to be complicated to start — one spreadsheet, updated the day every invoice lands, beats a laminated sheet from last spring. The method for keeping it current without turning it into a second job is in the supplier management guide.
