Can Excel do everything Pryse does if I build the right model?

In theory, yes — Excel is Turing-complete. In practice, building automated margin leakage detection, price waterfall analysis, and opportunity quantification for thousands of SKUs in Excel takes months of analyst time and deep pricing expertise. Most companies never finish the project. Pryse delivers these insights from a CSV upload in under 24 hours.

Is Pryse meant to replace Excel entirely?

No. Pryse is a diagnostic tool that finds what Excel-based analysis typically misses. Many customers use Pryse to identify their biggest margin leakage sources, then use Excel to implement the pricing changes. Think of it as a pricing health check, not a replacement for your day-to-day tools.

What if my data is already in Excel?

That is the most common starting point. Export your pricing and transaction data from Excel as a CSV file, upload it to Pryse, and get your diagnostic results. No reformatting or special preparation needed beyond having columns for product, price, cost, and customer data.

How much margin leakage can Pryse find that Excel misses?

It varies by company, but mid-market distributors typically have 2-5% of revenue in addressable margin leakage. For a $50M company, that is $1M-$2.5M in annual opportunity. The $999/year diagnostic typically pays for itself many times over by identifying these specific opportunities.

I have a pricing analyst who is great at Excel. Do I still need Pryse?

A skilled analyst is valuable, but they are limited by what they think to look for. Pryse applies systematic pattern detection across every SKU, customer, and transaction — finding the margin leakage that even experienced analysts miss because they are focused on the accounts and products they already know about.

Can I do a price waterfall analysis in Excel?

You can build a price waterfall chart in Excel, but it requires significant manual setup: defining each waterfall step, calculating pocket prices, and formatting the stacked bar chart. Pryse generates a complete price waterfall automatically from your transaction data, including list price, invoice price, and pocket price layers with all discounts and rebates mapped.

What data format does Pryse need?

Pryse accepts standard CSV files — the same format you would export from Excel. You need transaction-level data with columns for product identifiers, prices, costs, quantities, and customer information. Most companies can export this from their ERP or existing Excel workbooks in minutes.

Pryse vs Excel for Pricing Analysis

Compare Pryse and Excel for pricing analysis. See why mid-market distributors and manufacturers switch from spreadsheets to purpose-built pricing diagnostics.

BobMarch 12, 20267 min read

Quick Verdict

Excel is free if you already have Microsoft 365, infinitely flexible, and familiar to everyone. But for mid-market distributors and manufacturers with thousands of SKUs, it cannot automatically surface the margin leakage hiding in your data. Pryse exists to answer the one question Excel cannot: 'What am I missing?' If you suspect there is money leaking from your pricing but do not know where, a $999/year diagnostic will likely find more in 24 hours than months of spreadsheet analysis.

At a glance

Feature	Excel / Spreadsheets	Pryse
Time to first pricing insight	Days to weeks (manual model building)	Under 24 hours (upload CSV, get results)
Margin leakage detection	Manual — only finds what you look for	Automated pattern detection across all SKUs
Price waterfall visualization	Possible but requires manual chart building	Built-in, generated automatically from your data
Handles 50,000+ SKUs	Slows down significantly; pivot tables struggle	Built for high-SKU environments
Dollar opportunity quantification	Requires custom formulas and assumptions	Automatic — shows $ at risk by category
Flexibility for ad-hoc analysis	Unlimited — build anything you can imagine	Focused on pricing diagnostics only
Learning curve	Already known by most employees	Simple CSV upload, no training needed
Pricing knowledge retention	Lives in one person's files and head	Structured output that anyone can read
Cost	Included in existing Microsoft 365 subscription	$999/year
Ongoing price management	Can build update workflows (manual effort)	Diagnostic snapshot — not ongoing management
Error detection in pricing data	No built-in validation for pricing logic	Flags anomalies and inconsistencies automatically
Implementation required	None (but model building is the implementation)	None — self-serve CSV upload

What is Excel / Spreadsheets?

Microsoft Excel is a general-purpose spreadsheet application used by millions of businesses for everything from accounting to pricing analysis. Most mid-market distributors and manufacturers manage their pricing in Excel, using formulas, pivot tables, and VLOOKUPs to analyze margins and set prices.

Excel is not a pricing tool — it is a blank canvas. Companies build their own pricing workflows on top of it, often accumulating years of custom formulas, macros, and linked workbooks. While Excel offers flexibility, this approach typically means that pricing knowledge lives in one person's head, analysis is manual and error-prone, and the business lacks a systematic way to find margin leakage. According to industry surveys, spreadsheet errors affect roughly 88% of workbooks, and pricing-specific spreadsheets are no exception. For companies with thousands of SKUs, the gap between what Excel can show you and what you actually need to know about your pricing grows wider every year.

What is Pryse?

Pryse is a self-serve pricing diagnostics tool for mid-market distribution and manufacturing companies. Upload a CSV of your transaction data, and Pryse automatically identifies margin leakage across your product catalog — variance problems, long-tail SKU issues, and rebate gaps. Results in 24 hours, not months.

Want to analyze margins across your entire catalog?

Pryse finds hidden margin leakage in 24 hours. $999/year.

Try Pryse

Pricing

Detail	Excel / Spreadsheets	Pryse
Pricing model	Microsoft 365 subscription or one-time license	$999/year
Microsoft 365 Business Basic	Per-user monthly subscription	$999/year
Microsoft 365 Business Standard	Per-user monthly subscription	$999/year
Excel standalone (one-time)	One-time purchase	$999/year
Cost after 1 year	Microsoft 365 subscription or one-time license	$999
Cost after 3 years	Microsoft 365 subscription or one-time license	$2,997
Implementation	Varies	None — self-serve CSV upload

Which to choose

Choose Excel / Spreadsheets if:

•You have fewer than 500 SKUs and can manually review each one
•You need ongoing price list management, not an annual diagnostic
•Your pricing analyst is an Excel power user who has already built sophisticated models
•You want maximum flexibility to build custom financial models beyond pricing
•Budget is the primary constraint and your Microsoft 365 subscription is already paid for
•You need a tool for general business analysis beyond just pricing

Choose Pryse if:

•You have 5,000+ SKUs and cannot manually check each one for margin leakage
•You suspect you are leaving money on the table but do not know where to start
•Your pricing knowledge is trapped in one person's spreadsheet and you need a second opinion
•You want a price waterfall visualization without building it from scratch
•You need dollar-quantified opportunities to make a business case for pricing changes
•You have tried to do pricing analysis in Excel and keep running out of time or finding more questions than answers

Frequently Asked Questions

Related comparisons

Pricefx vs Pryse

AI pricing software made simple

Phocas vs Pryse

Business intelligence and financial analysis software

Pricing Strategy Consultants vs Pryse

Traditional pricing consulting engagements for B2B companies

Margin Analysis in Excel: Formulas, Templates, and Practical Limits

Blog post

How to Build a Price Waterfall in Excel (Step-by-Step)

Blog post

How to Calculate Margin in Excel: Formulas with Examples

Blog post

How to Create a Waterfall Chart in Excel (Complete Guide)

Blog post

9 Causes of Margin Leakage in Distribution and Manufacturing

Blog post

How to Fix Margin Leakage: 7 Fixes That Recover 2-5% of Revenue

Blog post

Want to analyze your entire product catalog?

Pryse automatically identifies margin leakage across thousands of SKUs. Upload your data and find hidden profit in 24 hours.

Start free analysis View pricing

$999/year. Cancel anytime.