The work · demonstration build
Price-Creep Watchdog
Catches the quiet 6% your suppliers add when nobody compares this year's invoice line to last year's — even when they rename the part.
Demo data is a realistic fabricated sample — no client's real numbers on this site.
The challenge
Your supply house bumped half your items a point or two at a time, on different invoices,
in different months, under three different line descriptions — and you paid every one
without noticing. It isn't theft; it's drift, and the supplier is structurally betting
nobody checks. The same part shows up as COPPER FITTING 1/2,
Fitting, Cu .5in, and CU FTG 1/2 inch, so even a careful
spreadsheet can't line this year up against last year without doing the matching first.
The demo
It opens on the number, not a chart — what the quiet increases cost per year, at the volumes actually bought. Tap an item and the price line draws with every step annotated, because a 6% creep is deliberately built to look flat. Then tap through to how the matching was done: every pairing with its confidence, and a queue of lines it refused to guess at.
Line items in the demo are pre-extracted — in a real engagement, extraction is built and tuned per your suppliers' actual invoice formats, with a review step, and extraction quality is measured, not promised. The matching and all of the math run live in your browser.
How it earns the numbers
The matcher works the way a careful person would: normalize the words, expand the abbreviations, treat sizes as sacred (1/2 is never 1/4, whatever the spelling distance says), and put a confidence on every pairing. The ones it isn't sure about wait for a human — "FITTING 1/2" with no metal named is a line a reasonable person would hesitate on too, so it sits in a visible queue instead of getting guessed. Confirm or reject a match and the headline figure re-totals in front of you, because the math is computed, not painted on. Announced increases — the ones on the invoice footers — carry a badge, and accepting one removes it from the count: the tool flags everything; you decide what was expected.
What it would cost
A Price-Creep Audit — your last two to three years of supplier invoices, read once and reported the way the demo reports: flat, in the $1,500–$3,500 range depending on supplier count and invoice format, with your exact price fixed in writing before work starts. If you want it watching every new invoice after that, the ongoing watchdog is a build of its own — typically $5,000–$12,000, scoped in writing.
How it's built
For the people who read this far on purpose: everything runs client-side. The matching is deterministic code you can read — token normalization with an abbreviation dictionary, typo distance, exact-only size comparison — no black boxes, no match-rate claims. The chart is hand-rolled SVG, about a hundred lines, because the annotations are the point. Money math is integer cents; dates are day offsets so the sample never goes stale. The thirty months of invoices come from the same seeded data generator as the other demos, with the believability warts on purpose: bursty typos, one-invoice discounts, a pack that quietly shrank from 1,000-count to 900, and a stable majority that never moved at all.
Working with something like this? Call or text me: [FILL: phone]