Definition
Price creep
A series of small supplier unit-price increases on the same SKU that accumulate over deliveries without an explicit renegotiation, margin death by a thousand invoices.
Worked example
House vodka invoices: Jan $12.00/bottle, Mar $12.35, May $12.80. On 40 bottles/week, the $0.80 creep is ~$32/week (~$1,660/year) before you change the well or the cocktail price. No single invoice looked alarming, only the trend across deliveries reveals it.
When operators use this
Watch price creep on the well brands that move every night. A forty-cent bump is easy to miss and expensive at volume. bar invoice management is the product page. recipe cost must update the same week. Then decide whether to reprice, switch vendors, or accept the band move.
Common mistakes
Comparing this week's bid to a list price you never actually paid, or treating a negotiated new contract as creep, wastes the meeting. Use your own invoice history for the same SKU and supplier. Document a new baseline when you renegotiate.
How ExactPour handles it
ExactPour captures line prices from invoice OCR and compares them to your purchase history for the same product and supplier, flagging creep so pour cost and recipe cost update from reality instead of last year's bid sheet. Managers can reprice or switch vendors with evidence instead of memory.
Qualification
Detectable only when each delivered invoice price is compared to that account's own purchase history for the same product and supplier. List-price changes that you already negotiated into a new bid are not creep; document the new baseline.