Price indicators checklist for retail
The fifteen indicators our team goes through with a new client before touching any price: what each one answers, how to calculate it, how often, and where it tends to fail.
It is not a list for measuring everything. It is for knowing, on one screen, what your operation already tracks, what it tracks from time to time and what nobody looks at — which is the question that comes before any pricing decision.
The order is not random: the first ones are per-item calculations, the middle ones add up what the first ones produce, and the last ones depend on looking outside the company. Anyone who does not measure the first four has nothing to gain by starting with the last.
Excel spreadsheet (.xlsx), in Portuguese · free
What is inside
The whole file, tab by tab, before you decide whether it is worth your email.
- Fifteen indicators, one per row
- From the markup actually applied per item to the time between a cost change and a price change, including contribution margin, cost of the payment terms granted, COGS, break-even point, ABC curve, discounts granted and price relative to competitors.
- What each one answers and how to calculate it
- The question the indicator answers, the calculation that produces it and how often it needs to be redone — weekly, monthly, quarterly or at every price change.
- Where each indicator tends to fail
- The mistake we find in practice, written next to the indicator: fixed expense added into contribution margin, payment terms treated as if they cost nothing, COGS calculated on what was purchased, the ABC curve read without crossing it with contribution.
- A response column and an owner column
- Three closed options — "não medimos", "medimos às vezes", "medimos sempre" (we don't measure, we measure sometimes, we always measure) — plus owner and next step. An indicator without an owner does not become routine.
- The summary tab
- Counts the responses by itself and returns the snapshot worth showing in the meeting: how many of the fifteen the operation measures today, and what each group means.
How to use it
Four steps, in the order they happen in the first half hour with the file open.
Fill in the status column on each row
There are three options, and the list is closed on purpose: the summary tab counts the responses, and free text would make the count stop adding up.
Give an owner and a next step to whatever isn't up to date
Only to the rows that are not at "medimos sempre". The checklist is not meant to produce fifteen projects — it is meant to choose the first two.
Read the summary together with the purchasing team
A good part of these indicators lives between sales and purchasing, and the conversation tends to be the first time the two areas look at the same number.
Redo it in a quarter
What changes between the two snapshots is what the work produced. It is also the most honest measure of how much of the pricing decision stopped being a guess.
What the checklist doesn't do
It says what to measure and where measurement tends to go wrong. What it does not do is measure — and that difference shows up as early as the second month.
- It calculates nothing
- The calculations keep happening where they already did: in the ERP, in the spreadsheet, in the report someone puts together on Fridays. The checklist is the map, not the tool.
- A weekly indicator done by hand becomes monthly
- Half the list calls for weekly reading. In practice, whatever depends on someone putting a report together ends up monthly, and then quarterly, without anyone deciding that.
- Measuring doesn't change prices
- Knowing that thirty items are below the floor is only worth something when the list reaches whoever can change their prices — with the number next to it, on a day when there is still time.
Download the price indicators checklist
Fill it in and the file opens on the next page, ready to download right away. It takes less than a minute.
Further reading
The blog covers the same subjects with the whole story: the operation, the numbers and what changed afterwards.
The other material
The two complement each other: one builds the price, the other tracks what happens to it afterwards.
Want to see this in your operation?
A conversation with people who calculate retail margin every day, with your numbers on screen.