Checklist
Contract price compliance audit checklist
Seven steps from raw supplier files to a documented claim. Work them in order — most failed audits fail at normalization, long before anyone argues about a price.
Pair this with the column mapper for step 3, the savings calculator to size the prize, and the glossary for any term here that is new.
Step 1 — Gather the agreements, with dates
- Every price list version, not just the current one, each with its effective start and end date.
- Job-specific quotes, with the project or purchase order they were written for and their expiry.
- Rebate or percent-off-list terms, and the list they are calculated from.
- Freight, fuel surcharge and minimum-order terms, which are audited separately from product price.
Step 2 — Pull the invoice detail
Header-level totals are useless here. You need line detail: part number, description, unit of measure, quantity, unit price and extended amount, plus the invoice date and the project or purchase order reference. If your ERP export drops the unit column, fix that before anything else — comparisons without units are guesses.
Step 3 — Normalize before you compare
- Map each supplier's columns once and save the profile so the next file loads in seconds.
- Convert units to a canonical unit per product family, using a per-supplier alias table.
- Stem part numbers so distributor-specific variants match the contracted item.
- Strip non-product lines — freight, deposits, levies — into their own bucket.
Step 4 — Run the comparisons
- Match each line to the contracted price in effect on the invoice date, never today's price.
- Flag overcharges and undercharges separately; never net them silently.
- Pair credits with their rebills so one correction is not counted twice.
- Apply a percentage and a dollar tolerance to keep rounding noise out of the queue.
- Classify every unmatched line by reason and route it to the right owner.
Step 5 — Measure coverage before you trust the result
The number that matters early on is not the variance total — it is the share of invoice line value you were actually able to match. A tool reporting a small variance on forty percent coverage has told you almost nothing. Drive coverage up by resolving unmatched reasons in order of dollar impact, and re-run.
Step 6 — Document and submit
- Group findings by supplier and period into one claim rather than many.
- Attach the contract version, the invoice reference and the arithmetic to every line.
- Assign an owner and a follow-up date; give the claim a status you can report on.
- Reconcile incoming credits against the claim so nothing is chased twice.
Step 7 — Close the loop with the supplier
Review error rate, variance dollars and days-to-credit with each supplier on a regular cycle. Accuracy improves once a supplier knows the measurement exists, and that recurring improvement is usually worth more than any single recovery.
Common questions
- How often should we run a contract price compliance audit?
- Continuously if you can. A monthly cycle keeps findings inside the window where suppliers credit without argument; annual audits find more dollars on paper and recover a smaller share of them.
- Who should own the audit internally?
- Usually accounts payable or the controller for the process, with procurement owning the supplier conversation. The audit produces evidence; the commercial relationship decides how it is used.
- What if our price lists are not in a usable file?
- Start with the highest-spend suppliers and get those lists into a spreadsheet with effective dates. Partial coverage on your biggest suppliers beats complete coverage on none.
- Can we do this in a spreadsheet?
- For one supplier and one period, yes. It stops scaling as soon as you need effective-dated price versions, unit normalization and credit pairing across several suppliers every month.
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