Your quotes are not wrong. Your price sheet is.

When a fire and security business tells us its margins are inconsistent, the first thing we ask to see is not the quotes. It is the file the quotes are priced from.

It is usually a spreadsheet. Sometimes it is three spreadsheets, one per estimator. Sometimes it is a supplier PDF from last spring saved to someone's desktop. In almost every case, nobody can tell us when a given price was last checked.

That is where the margin goes.

The markup is fine. The cost underneath it is not. #

Most contractors have a sensible markup. The problem is what the markup is applied to. If a detector cost £20 when the sheet was last updated and costs £22 today, a 30% markup on £20 gives a sell price of £26. Your real markup on that line is not 30%. It is about 18%.

Nobody notices on one line. Across a year of quotes, it adds up. In our Leak Report model, a £3 million contractor that fails to pass on 3% of supplier price rises loses about £24,000 a year, with no single quote looking wrong.

Why this is so hard to see #

Three reasons.

Prices move quietly. Suppliers do not always announce increases. They appear on the next invoice, which goes to accounts, not to the estimator.

The loss hides inside the job. When a job comes in under target, it is easy to blame the labour or the site. Materials rarely get looked at because the quote shows a healthy markup.

Everyone has their own copy. When estimators keep their own sheets, the business has no single answer to "what does this part cost us today?"

The one field that fixes most of it #

Add a date to every line of your parts list: the date that cost was last confirmed.

Then set a rule. If a price is older than, say, sixty days, it gets checked before it goes on a quote. That is the whole fix for most businesses. It costs nothing and it can be done in the spreadsheet you already have.

Two habits make it stick:

1. One list, owned by one person. Not one per estimator. One.
2. Supplier sheets go into the list the day they arrive. Not into an inbox to be dealt with later.

Where software helps, and where it does not #

Software can read supplier price lists in whatever format they arrive, match them to your parts, and flag stale prices automatically. That is what we built into Vero, because it is tedious work that nobody enjoys and everyone puts off.

But software cannot decide your markup, and it cannot make your estimators use the list. If three people are still pricing from their own files, a better tool just gives you a fourth file.

Fix the habit first. Then automate it.

Try this on Monday #

Pick your ten highest-volume parts. Check each one against your current supplier price. Count how many are out of date and by how much.

If the answer is "none", you are ahead of most of the industry. If it is not, you now know roughly what it is costing you.