Supplier Price-Increase Request Review: Stop Letting Hikes Slip Through

The problem this kills

A supplier price-increase letter lands in your inbox. "Effective the 1st, all line items go up 7% due to raw material costs." You're busy, the supplier is important, the increase sounds plausible — so it gets a quick "ok, noted" reply and quietly flows into the next PO. Multiply that by dozens of suppliers a quarter and the leakage is enormous.

The trouble is there's no standard way to evaluate these. Nobody checks whether the contract actually allows a 7% jump, or whether it caps annual increases at 4%, or whether it's tied to a published index that only moved 2%. Nobody multiplies the increase by your annual volume to see that this one "small" hike is $180,000 a year. And nobody keeps a record of who approved what, so the same increase can get waved through twice and you can't prove later that you ever pushed back.

The result is margin that erodes one reasonable-sounding email at a time. You don't need a procurement suite to fix this, and you don't need to be a developer.

What you'll build

A small internal web tool — login-protected, only your team — that turns price-increase chaos into a consistent, evidence-backed workflow:

• Intake a price-increase request: supplier, items, current vs proposed price, % increase, the supplier's justification, and the effective date.
• Compute the true picture: exact % increase per item and the annualized dollar impact across your real volume/spend, so you see total exposure, not just a percentage.
• Compare the ask against your contract terms — price caps, index/escalation clauses, required notice period — and flag anything above the cap or above what the index justifies.
• Recommend accept, negotiate, or reject, with the reasoning shown.
• Route for decision: a category manager reviews, and anything above a dollar threshold you set escalates to a higher approver. Nothing changes pricing automatically.
• Act: on approval, the tool drafts the approved price-list update (ready for your price-compliance tool), emails a response to the supplier, exports a clean CSV, and logs the whole decision.

What's inside the Implementation Plan

The plan is a single file you paste into an AI coding agent like Claude Code. It builds the whole tool with you, step by step, in plain language.

It opens by interviewing you about your business — your current intake process, the systems and spreadsheets you live in, how your contracts express caps and index clauses, your item/SKU naming, your typical and peak request volumes, your approval thresholds, and your messy edge cases (mid-contract increases, surcharges dressed up as price changes, partial-line increases). Then it reads a short tailored spec back to you for a thumbs-up. You're building a tool shaped around how you actually buy — not a generic template.

From there it walks through database design, the intake screen, the calculation and contract-comparison engine, the recommendation logic, the approval gate with escalation, supplier email, and the CSV export — each step ending in a ready-to-paste prompt.

The governance it includes (this is the point)

This isn't a calculator you'll abandon. It's built to be the system of record for pricing decisions:

• Login so only your team can use it.
• Row-level security so each organization only ever sees its own contracts, prices, and requests.
• A complete audit trail — who logged the request, what the AI recommended, who approved or rejected, and when.
• A hard human-in-the-loop approval gate: the AI drafts a recommendation, a category manager (and a higher approver above your threshold) must approve, and only then is the new price written to the price list. Pricing never updates on its own.
• Duplicate guards keyed on supplier + item + effective date, so the same increase request can't be processed twice.

Who it's for

Category managers and buyers who keep getting hit with price-increase letters and have no consistent, defensible way to evaluate them — and who are tired of "approving" hikes by replying to an email. If you can fill in a spreadsheet, you can build and run this.

You've got this — paste the first prompt and let the interview tailor it to your business.