The numbers that stopped adding up
Alder & Hide has built the same waxed-canvas-and-leather Wharf Tote since Marisol Ferreira opened the workshop eleven years ago. It's the bag people ask for by name, the one that carries the rest of the range at every market stall. At year-end, her daughter Noor, who keeps the books, noticed something that didn't sit right: the tote's margin had slipped from close to 38% to 24% — without the pattern changing, without a new supplier, without the workshop changing a single thing about how the bag was made.
"Nothing about it made sense," Marisol said. "We were still selling at the same price, still cutting the same pattern. It was just the numbers that had stopped agreeing with us."
The people in this story
Marisol Ferreira
Owner and leatherworker. Has cut the same tote pattern for eleven years — had never seen the margin slide like this.
Noor Ferreira
Marisol's daughter. Keeps the books, and was the first to notice the margin shrinking.
Tobias Lund
Cutter. Works the same hide every day, without ever checking what it cost.
Grace Odell
Leather supplier. Each invoice, on its own, looked perfectly reasonable.
A rise cut into slices too small to notice
There was no fraud, no accounting error. Leather had simply gone up in price — not in one jump big enough to catch anyone's eye, but in small slices, invoice after invoice, over six months: a few cents here, a few there, always within what looked like normal supplier variation. Nobody kept the old invoices next to the new ones to compare — why would they, when each rise on its own never looked worth remarking on?
It was only when Noor laid January's invoice next to June's that the two numbers, side by side, told the whole story: leather was up 38% in half a year, and nobody had noticed it happening.
How Top 10 price swings catches it without comparing a single invoice by hand
Alder & Hide had already been logging ingredient — sorry, raw material — prices in BOMCost for over a year, mostly to know what each bag cost to build, not to police suppliers. It was opening the "Analysis" tab and clicking "Top 10 price swings" that showed Noor, without lining up a single invoice by hand, the list sorted from the biggest rise down: Leather, +38%, right at the top — well ahead of anything else the workshop buys.
There was no guessing where to look, no rebuilding six months of invoices from a drawer. The prices were already logged; all it took was asking BOMCost what had risen the most.
Illustrative only
Sorted on its own, biggest rise first — no lining up invoices by hand, one at a time.
Back to the margin it should have
With the number in front of her, Marisol knew exactly who to call and what about: she agreed a larger order with Grace at a better price per hide, and adjusted the tote's price for the first time in three years. At the next year-end close, the margin was back near 36%.
Today, "Top 10 price swings" gets checked every month at Alder & Hide — not waiting for another shock at year-end, but to catch the next sliced-up rise before it ever reaches forty percent.
"Top 10 price swings" is part of BOMCost, where Alder & Hide also keeps its raw material catalogue, costs every bag against current prices, and watches any price move on a chart — all from the same history.
Could your margin be slipping away in small slices too?
A leather workshop, a metal shop, a small production line — Top 10 price swings works the same way, over your own raw materials and your own invoices.
Try it without signing up →