No written quote.
That doesn't mean
no information.
Most businesses that come to us don't have a formal quote to compare their invoices against. The order went in over the phone. The price was verbal. The supplier sent an invoice and it got paid. You still have data. Every invoice your supplier ever sent you is a document. We read all of them — simultaneously — and build the picture they've been hoping you'd never assemble.
no agreed price — live engagement
reference price on file
supplier-set prices · 2 months
A formal written quote — line by line, SKU by SKU, signed and dated — is the exception, not the rule. Most businesses that buy from suppliers regularly operate on standing accounts, verbal price agreements, expired quotes from years ago, or time-and-materials arrangements where the supplier tracks hours and materials and sends an invoice at the end.
This is not a failure of your procurement process. It is how supplier relationships work at small and mid-size scale. The supplier knows you. You trust them. The invoice arrives and it looks about right, so it gets paid. The absence of a formal quote doesn't mean there's nothing to find. It means the finding lives inside the invoice history itself.
Every invoice your supplier has sent you contains the same information: a date, a set of line items, a SKU or description for each one, a quantity, and a unit price. Across twelve months of invoices from one supplier, that's potentially thousands of data points — every item you've bought, every price you've paid, every date the transaction happened.
When you read those invoices one at a time, as they arrive, you see a bill. When you read all of them simultaneously, you see a pricing system. You see which items are bought most frequently. You see how prices have moved over time on individual SKUs. You see whether price movement correlates with the commodity markets that the materials are derived from — or whether it doesn't. You see where the same item was charged at different prices on different jobs.
That's the intelligence the no-quote audit produces. Not overcharge findings against an agreed price — you don't have an agreed price yet. What you get is a complete, documented picture of what your supplier has actually been charging you, formatted so you can go back to them and ask for a formal quote against their own numbers. At that point, they have to respond.
It requires a defensible benchmark.
That benchmark is constructable from public data.
When there is no written quote, the forensic question shifts from "did the supplier charge more than agreed" to "is what the supplier charged commercially reasonable." These are different questions. The second one has a methodology behind it.
Price reasonableness analysis compares invoiced prices against what a reasonable buyer in the same market would pay for the same item at the same time. The sources are the same ones used in government contract disputes, forensic accounting engagements, and procurement audits: historical prices paid for the same items, published commodity indices, and catalogue pricing from other suppliers in the same market.
The fact that a price appears in a supplier's catalog does not, in and of itself, make it fair and reasonable. This is established standard in commercial price analysis — it is the same principle government contracting officers apply every time they evaluate a sole-source supplier's invoice without competitive bids. It applies equally to a trade contractor, a restaurant group, or a property manager.
Every number in the deliverable traces back to a line item on an invoice your supplier sent you. There is no estimate. No interpolation. No invented benchmark. When you hand this across the table, every figure on it is something the supplier already knows — because they wrote it.
That is what changes the conversation.
the invoices.
Tell us how many suppliers, roughly how many invoices per month, and how far back your invoice history goes. We scope the engagement and confirm same day. Every finding traces to a source document.
ugly problem.
Direct intake for difficult information problems. Physical markets, procurement, pricing, supply chain, entity resolution, litigation support. Describe the problem. We scope the engagement.