The Price on the Invoice and the Price You Keep

How to read this sheet

This is the price side alone. What a customer costs to serve - the samples they take against the orders they place, the split deliveries, the audits - is a separate question with its own sheet, and a customer with a deep pocket discount and a light cost to serve can still be the better one. Read the two together or neither. Credit is charged only on days conceded beyond the standard terms, and a customer paying early is not credited for it because the settlement discount is what they were already paid: counting both would be double counting, and one of the two is usually already in the price list. Claims, freight and samples are entered as money for the period rather than as rates, so the answer moves with how honestly those are attributed - a sampling room that does not book its work to a customer will show every customer as cheap. The variable cost is one figure across every customer here, which is wrong wherever the product mix differs materially between them; where it does, run the sheet once per product family rather than once per customer list. Nothing here says a deep discount is unjustified. Volume, payment reliability, forecast quality and the cost of replacing the customer are all real and none of them are on this sheet - what it establishes is what the concession actually was, which is the thing that has to be true before any of those arguments can be had.