Glossary

Price drift detection is the process of identifying gradual, incremental price increases applied by suppliers across multiple invoices over time, increases that are individually too small to trigger manual review, but which compound into significant margin erosion when undetected.

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Unlike a single overbilling event, where a unit price is clearly wrong on a specific invoice, price drift operates below the visibility threshold of manual controls. A supplier increases a food ingredient from €10.00 to €10.30, then to €10.65, then to €11.10 over four months. No individual invoice triggers an alert. But the cumulative effect is a 30% price increase on a reference that accounts for 15% of your food cost — absorbed silently until a year-end review or an audit catches it.

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This is structurally invisible to teams relying on spot-checks or invoice sampling. Each invoice passes review in isolation; no one is comparing invoice n against invoice n-1 against the original negotiated price list across the full historical series. One Phacet prospect reported a supplier moving a product from €10 to €13 over just a few months, discovered only after the fact.

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Phacet's AI finance control detects price drift by maintaining a continuous comparison between each invoiced unit price and the reference price on record, flagging not just absolute errors, but statistically significant trends across invoice history. Combined with spend anomaly detection, the system surfaces drift patterns before they become entrenched in the cost base.

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For F&B operators and retail groups managing hundreds of supplier references, price drift detection transforms a passive cost, slowly eroding margins, into an actively monitored and actionable signal.