Trade price lists for UK wholesalers: getting out of the spreadsheet era

The UK wholesale price list has a traditional home: a spreadsheet, emailed around, with a filename ending in FINAL-v3. It worked when the business was smaller. It leaks now.

The UK-specific pressure

UK trade pricing has its own texture. Prices are quoted ex-VAT between businesses, your accounts expect a tier — trade, wholesale, key account — and HMRC’s Making Tax Digital direction of travel keeps nudging record-keeping away from ad-hoc files towards systems that hold one version of the truth. (What MTD requires of your business specifically is one for your accountant and gov.uk — but the spreadsheet era is visibly ending.)

Where spreadsheets leak

Two staff with two versions. A price rise applied to the file but not the counter. A new SKU with no trade price at all. Each is a small failure that ends in undercharging — see what manual trade pricing really costs.

The tidier way

Hold your tiers in a pricing engine instead: named tiers, a formula per tier from cost or RRP, attractive rounding, and a two-way sync that writes the prices into Linnworks itself as extended properties. The spreadsheet grid is still there for edge cases — it is just no longer the master copy.

B2B Price Tiers was built for exactly this, by a UK wholesaler, and feeds Trade Order POS so counter staff never look a price up again. Find out more →

Questions, or want a tool we don't have yet? Email hello@grafto.co.uk — a real person replies.