Procurement monitoring for small businesses
Your supplier put their price up in March.Did you notice?
CostSpring watches what your business pays for cases, pallets, haulage, cleaning, gloves and the rest of the boring stuff. When a price moves, when the market moves the other way, or when a line has gone too long untested, it tells you what it is worth in money, who to ask, and writes the email for you to send.
Before anything else
Work out what this is worth to you
Not a forecast and not a promise. It is arithmetic on your own numbers. Put in roughly what leaves the account each month for the boring stuff, and see what a few percent off it comes to over a year.
Cases, pallets, haulage, cleaning, waste, consumables. A rough figure is enough.
What that is worth over a year
£3,850
if a round moved 7% of it — what a competitive round often moves. Straight to profit, because none of it costs anything to earn.
| 3% | A routine price review | £1,650 a year |
| 7% | What a competitive round often moves | £3,850 a year |
| 12% | Only where the incumbent has drifted | £6,600 a year |
These are what a reduction of that size would be worth on your numbers. Whether the market supports one depends on how long it has been since anyone looked.
The problem
Nobody in the building is watching
Most small businesses set up their suppliers once and never go back. Prices drift. Suppliers raise them quietly, on an invoice, with no email. Meanwhile the market moves.
It is not that you do not know you should re-tender. It is that finding ten suppliers, writing the enquiry, chasing them, and then working out whether £0.128 with a 10,000 minimum actually beats £0.140 with next-day delivery is a full day's work. It is always the thing that gets bumped.
Why it is worth the hour
Money found beats money earned
What you stop spending goes straight to the bottom line. What you earn has to get past the cost of earning it first.
At a 10% net margin, a thousand pounds a year off your input costs does the same for your profit as ten thousand pounds of extra sales. At 5%, twenty thousand. And the extra sales need marketing, stock, delivery and somebody to handle it. The thousand off your costs needs one email.
The same arithmetic, on one line
- A penny off a unit
- Sounds like nothing on one invoice. Multiplied by everything you make, it is a salary — every month, for as long as the price holds.
- You grew; your price did not move
- Price breaks are real, and nobody at your supplier is going to ring you when you cross one. The rate you agreed at ten pallets a year is often still the rate at forty.
The mechanics
How it works
- 1
Connect your accounts
Link Xero or QuickBooks and we'll find your recurring purchases. No typing in forty lines.
- 2
Pick what to watch
Tell us what you buy and what you pay. We link each item to public price indices and start watching.
- 3
Get told when it's worth acting
"Smurfit raised your case price 5.7% in July. On your volume that's £4,000 a month." With the invoice reference attached.
- 4
We find who to ask, and write the email
CostSpring shortlists suppliers who can actually serve your category, volume and area, and drafts the enquiry under your name. You send it from your own email, so it comes from you and the replies come back to you.
- 5
You forward the replies; we make them comparable
Forward what comes back, or type the figures in. CostSpring converts every quote to a landed cost per unit you actually use, with the minimums, tooling and carriage priced in.
Why it exists
I built this because I needed it
I have spent eight years building a drinks brand from Glasgow. Around year five I sat down and audited the boring stuff — cases, labels, pallet wrap, haulage, waste, gloves. Forty lines, most set up in the first year and never looked at since. It took a fortnight of evenings, I found real money, and then I never did it again, because I had a business to run. That is the whole problem.
Signals
What it watches
- Your own invoices
- When a supplier's unit price moves, you hear about it the same week.
- Public price indices
- ONS producer prices, HMRC import values, diesel, global commodity indices. If corrugated has fallen 3% and your price has not, that is a conversation.
- New suppliers
- When someone new can serve your area and your volumes.
- Time
- Lines that have never been tested, or have not been for years.
- Trade press
- Announced increases in your categories, before they reach your invoice.
Objections
The questions people actually ask
- Will this annoy my suppliers?
- It asks them to quote, which is their job. Every email goes out under your name, with your details, in normal business language. It never mentions a competitor and never quotes a rival’s price. You read every message before it goes, and you can exclude any supplier permanently.
- Is AI emailing my suppliers without me?
- No, and it cannot. CostSpring drafts; you send it yourself from your own email client. Nothing reaches a supplier except by you sending it, replies come back to your inbox rather than ours, and there is no setting where it agrees a price on your behalf.
- What if I don’t want to switch supplier?
- Most of the time you should not. A good quote is usually worth more as a conversation with the supplier you already have. CostSpring drafts that too, and tracks whether they matched.
- Where do the suppliers come from, and are they any good?
- Every supplier we suggest has been checked by a person. We confirm they are a real trading business, that their website says they supply what you are buying, and that the enquiries address we hold is one they publish themselves and that actually accepts mail. We do not check their quality, their finances, or their certifications unless we say we have — that is what the quote and your own judgement are for. After that the list gets better on its own: we track who replies, who quotes, and who tells us their minimum order is too high.
- How much does it actually find?
- It depends entirely on how long it has been. We tell you what is on the table before you spend anything, and if a round finds nothing better than you already have, that round is free.
Pricing
Four tiers, no sales call
For businesses that buy the same things from the same suppliers month after month and have nobody whose job it is to check the prices, CostSpring watches what you pay, tells you when there is money on the table with the evidence attached, and runs the quote round or the price conversation that captures it. It starts at 10 lines and £39 a month, because the problem starts long before a business is big enough to hire someone to solve it.
Watch
£39 a month
Or £390 a year, which is 10 months for twelve
10 lines watched, alerts and rounds bought one at a time
Source
£129 a month
Or £1,290 a year, which is 10 months for twelve
25 lines watched, 12 rounds a year
Source Plus
£249 a month
Or £2,490 a year, which is 10 months for twelve
75 lines watched, 40 rounds a year
Scale
£449 a month
Or £4,490 a year, which is 10 months for twelve
200 lines watched, 100 rounds a year