A supplier price increase report for Xero

What Xero shows you today

Reports like Account Transactions and Payable Invoice Detail show spend by supplier and by account. If you use tracked inventory items, you can see what you paid for an item over time. But most small businesses enter bills with descriptions rather than item codes, and there's no built-in report that compares the same item's price a year apart across all your suppliers.

Building it yourself

1. Export your bills with their line items for the last two years (for example, from the Payable Invoice Detail report) to a spreadsheet.
2. Clean up the descriptions so the same item has the same name. Remove dates, PO numbers and invoice references.
3. Work out a unit price before GST for every line: line amount less tax, divided by quantity.
4. Use a pivot table to compare each item's average unit price early in the period with recently.
5. Multiply each change by the quantity bought in the last 12 months, and sort by the result.

It works, but it's a few hours each time, and it's easy to get wrong when descriptions vary or bills mix GST-inclusive and exclusive amounts.

What Billflation does for you

• Connects in a minute, read-only, and reads 25 months of bills and credit notes.
• Matches items by item code or by description, with dates and references stripped, within each supplier.
• Uses unit prices before GST, handles credit notes, discounts and foreign-currency bills.
• Shows its working: the two bills behind every rise, and a separate list of matches to double-check.
• Keeps watching on the paid plan, and tells you when a supplier puts a price up.