Promotional and seasonal prices overrun because only one of their two dates has anyone enforcing it. The start date is enforced by the customer, who queries the first order that prices incorrectly. The end date is enforced by nobody outside the business, and it is often held in the email that agreed it rather than on the price record itself. A price doing exactly what it was configured to do produces no exception report and no customer complaint, so the overrun is usually found weeks later during a margin review, after the invoices have been raised and paid.
Why does the start date hold when the end date does not?
Seasonal and promotional pricing is one of the few commercial decisions in foodservice that arrives with an expiry date built into it. The expiry date is the part that tends not to hold.
Both dates are agreed in the same conversation, by the same people, on the same terms. On paper they carry equal weight.
In practice only one of them has anyone chasing it.
If a temporary price applies late, the customer notices immediately and raises it. If it applies for too long, the customer is being charged less than they expected, so there is nothing to raise. The control on the front end is the customer relationship. There is no equivalent control on the back end.
What does a promotional overrun actually look like?
A summer price is agreed with a wholesaler across a soft drinks range, running to the end of the season. It is set up properly and applied on time. Autumn orders arrive and continue to price at the summer rate, because the record carries a start date and the end date lives in the email thread that agreed it.
The autumn trades on summer pricing until somebody in finance notices during a margin review. By then the invoices are out, the customer has paid them, and there is no version of that conversation which recovers the difference without costing more in goodwill than it returns in margin.
Nothing was entered incorrectly. The price was right on the day it was agreed. It simply outlived the reason it existed.
Can a promotion fail even when the dates work correctly?
Yes, and this is the version that is harder to see.
A promotional price is granted to support a launch, on the understanding that it moves an agreed volume within a set window. The promotion runs to schedule and closes on the day it was meant to. The customer takes the price and well short of the volume.
Nothing goes wrong operationally. The promotion is recorded as delivered because the only thing checked afterwards was whether the dates held.
The price was granted in exchange for something. Whether that something arrived was never tested.
Why does this not show up as an error?
There is no exception report for a price doing exactly what it was configured to do, and no query from a customer being charged less than they expected. The absence of complaint reads as the absence of a problem.
Over a year, in a business running seasonal and promotional activity across several categories and accounts, that becomes a meaningful amount of margin. Some of it was given away on purpose, which is what promotional investment is for. The rest was given away because nothing in the process was built to stop.
What do businesses that handle this well do differently?
They are not doing anything sophisticated.
They hold the end date in the same place as the start date, on the record rather than in the conversation that agreed it. They treat a temporary price as an exception that has to be closed, not a change that has been made. And they look at what a promotion bought, not only whether it ran.
How can I check whether our own pricing windows are being closed?
A short exercise, if it is useful.
List every temporary price currently live across your customer accounts, then check where each end date is actually held. If it sits in an email thread, a calendar reminder or somebody’s memory rather than on the record itself, it is not a control.
Take one promotion that finished in the last six months and compare the price that was granted against the volume it was granted for.
Trace a price that has changed twice in the last year, and identify who was responsible for closing the first version of it.
Then consider which part of the business would find out first if a promotional price ran two months past its window, and how long that would take. If the answer is finance, at the next margin review, the window is being reported on rather than managed.
How does Allsop help keep temporary prices temporary?
At Allsop, we work with food and beverage businesses to keep temporary prices temporary, through intelligent software for Customer Order Management, Data Workbench and Customer Margin Management. That means agreed prices held together with the dates that govern them, orders validated against the price that should apply on the day they are placed, and a clear view of what a promotion returned rather than only whether it ran.
Temporary is a decision, not a description.
If the business runs seasonal or promotional activity and cannot say quickly how many temporary prices are live today, it may be worth a closer look.
Read more Allsop insights on the blog, or speak to Allsop about how your pricing windows are being closed.
