Protecting product margins is crucial for maintaining profitability and ensuring sustainable business growth. Modern enterprise software like Mechanter offers sophisticated tools to help businesses automatically safeguard their pricing strategies.

Automated margin protection involves several strategic approaches that can be implemented to minimise revenue risks and optimise pricing:

• Automated Price Tables: Create dynamic pricing structures that automatically adjust based on cost fluctuations, ensuring consistent margins across product ranges
• Cost-Based Markup: Configure base prices and price tables to dynamically increase when underlying costs rise, protecting profit margins in volatile markets
• User Access Control: Restrict pricing negotiation capabilities for junior staff members, preventing unauthorised margin reductions

Advanced margin protection strategies include:

1. Setting minimum margin levels for different sales categories:
   • Ex-stock sales
   • Direct sales
   • Per product
2. Establishing company-wide, depot-specific, and user-level minimum margin thresholds
3. Implementing exception checks during invoice processing to flag discounts exceeding predetermined percentages

The key philosophy behind these tools is creating responsive, intelligent pricing mechanisms that:

• Automatically adapt to changing cost structures
• Recognise customer purchasing patterns
• Reduce manual price negotiations
• Maintain consistent profitability

By leveraging automated pricing tools, businesses can develop more agile, data-driven pricing strategies that balance customer relationships with financial sustainability.