Is it a Happy New Year?! January each year is the time when new stationery catalogues are issued by the suppliers. And this is often the time when they seek to increase their prices to existing customers.
Some suppliers will use this opportunity to try and increase their margin, taking advantage of the existing relationship by asking for increases higher than the industry norm. How will you know if this has happened to your business?
You could of course ring around a few alternative suppliers to check prices on your most frequently used items, but this may result in a false conclusion, since suppliers looking to win new business will price aggressively on these kind of items, and then make their margin back on the remaining items you subsequently buy.
The only sure way is to analyse your expenditure (typically over the last 12 months) to identify within your expenditure the items where most of your expenditure is going and/or the most frequently used items. Once this data is obtained, a tender process should be carried out.
At Expense Reduction Analysts, we do this all the time and as we speak are currently reviewing more than £13.5m of spend in office stationery costs. Armed with this buying influence and market knowledge we typically achieve average savings of more than 25%.
If you don’t have the time to do this yourself, why not contact us for more information on how we could take a no obligation look at your expenditure.