Model a price increase before you send it: the price simulator

"Let's raise everything two percent" is a sentence that gets said in a lot of distributor offices, usually with no number attached to it. Two percent of what? On which items? Worth the customer calls it'll trigger? SideQuest's price simulator answers before you commit: it projects the annual revenue change from the quantities your items actually moved, so a pricing decision stops being a gut call.

The math it does for you

The simulator reads the prices and quantities from your real order history and holds volume constant. A uniform raise projects cleanly — a 2% bump on everything that moved is 2% of your annualized revenue on those items. A single-SKU change projects from that one item's own history: raise the SKU that ships 4,000 units a year and the number dwarfs the one that ships forty. It ranks by dollar impact, so the items worth a pricing conversation surface first. Honest caveat: it's revenue-only, not margin — QuickBooks Online doesn't expose cost reliably enough to trust — so read it as a top-line ceiling and bring your own cost knowledge.

How distributors actually use it

• The annual list review. Before the across-the-board letter goes out, see what the raise is worth and which SKUs carry it. Often a handful of high-movers deliver most of the gain, and you can leave the price-sensitive long tail alone.
• The single-item decision. A supplier raised your cost on one line. Model passing it through at 3%, 5%, 8% and see the revenue math before you pick.
• Pairing with stale-list. The pricing intelligence report flags items whose list price hasn't moved in a long time. The simulator tells you what moving it is worth. Together they're a price review that writes its own agenda.

It fits every catalog we serve

The leverage lives wherever a few SKUs carry the volume — which is most distribution. Industrial MRO shops with a deep long tail and a short high-mover list, fastener houses moving millions of a handful of parts, auto parts and HVAC distributors with seasonal spikes — the simulator finds the items where a small change is worth real money and flags the ones where it isn't worth the friction.

On the dashboard

The simulator lives on the operations dashboard as an interactive control: drag the what-if percentage and the projected annual impact updates live, right in the offline HTML snapshot. For a specific move, the simulate_pricing tool takes a SKU and a new price or percentage.

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