A supplier price book, known in French as mercuriale, is a structured reference document that records the agreed unit price for every product or SKU purchased from a supplier, typically negotiated per period (weekly, monthly, or quarterly). It is the contractual price reference against which every incoming supplier invoice line must be verified before payment.
The price book is the control foundation of supplier billing management. Without it, there is no objective reference to determine whether an invoiced price is correct. With it, every invoice line can be checked: does the unit price charged match the agreed price for this reference, in this period, at this volume?
The operational challenge is maintaining it in real time. Supplier price books change constantly, seasonal adjustments, raw material indexation, promotional pricing windows, negotiated discounts that apply to specific order volumes. A price book that is 3 months out of date is worse than no price book: it generates false positives on legitimate updates while missing actual overbillings on references that haven't been updated.
In F&B and retail environments, the price book is the direct input to mercuriale pricing control, the verification that every food or product invoice reflects the currently negotiated price, not a unilateral supplier update. Astotel identified up to €400/month in billing errors on a single supplier using this approach across 18 hotels.
Phacet's supplier price list control agent ingests the current price book, from ERP export, CSV, or direct supplier catalog, and applies it automatically to every incoming invoice: cross-referencing each invoiced unit price against the active reference for that SKU and period. Deviations surface as pre-payment control exceptions before any payment is released. Price book updates are versioned, auditable, and timestamped, so any change in accepted price is documented and traceable.
