Supplier raised prices? Update Square costs
When a supplier raises prices, your costs change first and your margins follow. How to update costs in Square and raise only the prices that need it.
A supplier price increase can change two fields in Square. The unit cost always changes. The selling price changes only if you decide it should.
Should I raise my prices when a supplier raises costs?
Not always. Update the cost on every item the supplier changed, so your reports stay accurate. Raise the selling price only where the new margin drops below the minimum you've set for yourself.
If an item falls below that minimum, decide on its price before your next order comes in.
What changes in Square
The increase changes the unit cost and nothing else, unless you change more yourself. Square keeps the unit cost on each variation and uses it for cost of goods sold, profit and profit margin. The price your customer pays is a separate field. Updating the cost leaves every price where it was.
Because the two fields are separate, an import file with both columns can change hundreds of prices at once. One wrong column mapping is enough to do that by mistake.
How do I update costs in Square without changing prices?
Map the supplier's cost column and leave the price column unmapped. The Square tool keeps cost and price as separate fields. If you map only cost, the file changes the unit costs and keeps every price Square has now, as long as the pricing rule is Use supplier's retail price with No rounding.
Start from your own Square export, so Square updates the items you already have. A blank template would make it create new ones.
Related guide: Update Square unit costs from a supplier spreadsheet
Find the items that fall under your margin
Decide the lowest margin you'll accept and check every row against it. Load your current Square export with the price list and turn on the Margin column. Each row then shows the margin the new cost leaves at today's Square price. Type your minimum under Price guards, and the tool marks every row that falls below it, with the row's margin shown next to your minimum.
| cost | was 8.00, now 9.25 |
|---|---|
| price | 12.99, unchanged |
| margin | was 38.4%, now 28.8% |
| result | marked, under the 30% minimum |
Open the Square tool to try it with your own file.
Raise only the prices that need it
Choose Target margin %, set it to your minimum and turn on Never lower a price. With No rounding, an item that still clears the minimum keeps its Square price. An item below it gets a new price that brings it back up to the minimum.
- When you approve a row, you take its new cost and its new price together.
- The bulk actions menu has Approve and Reject. Approve can take every row whose cost changed, or only the rows whose new price keeps your minimum margin. Reject takes out every low margin row.
- Rejecting a row drops its cost update too, so go through low margin rows one at a time.
When a row matches the wrong product
Keep that row out of the file until you've checked it. A late cost update does less harm than a wrong match. A wrong match puts one product's cost on another, and every margin you read from it after that is wrong. Look out for pack sizes, case prices set against single units, and variations with similar names.
The Square tool matches on SKU first, then GTIN, then exact name. A close name match is only a suggestion, and it stays out of the file until you confirm it.
Sometimes the codes break before matching even starts. If the price list was opened in Excel, its SKUs and UPCs can lose their leading zeros, and those rows match nothing.
Related guide: Leading zeros dropped from SKUs and UPCs
When to hold a price
Hold the price if the item still clears your minimum margin, if it brings customers in, or if the increase looks like a short spike. Raise it when the margin is under your minimum and the new cost looks like it will stay. If the same supplier keeps raising the same items, ask for a better price or find another supplier.
Wholesale costs don't all rise at the same rate. The Producer Price Index from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics shows how differently they move from one industry to another. Judge each category by its own numbers.
Check the other sizes on the shelf too. If one size goes from 14.99 to 16.49 and the next size up stays the same, the gap between them may stop making sense.