A wine estate in the Languedoc · Wine & spirits
From a 90-tab pricing spreadsheet to one web app
A Languedoc wine estate priced its whole catalogue — every cuvée, format, zone and channel — in a 90-tab Excel workbook only one person fully understood. We turned it into a single application.
The estate sells through distribution agents — each with a territory and a roster of producers — and priced everything (every cuvée, bottle format, zone and channel, wholesale and delivered) in one Excel workbook that had grown past ninety interlinked tabs. It sat quiet for months, then came alive each January when the new tariffs go out. We rebuilt it as one application with a real data model and a formula engine that catches mistakes without ever taking the pen out of the estate's hand.
The challenge
The whole price list lived in a 90-tab Excel workbook: every cuvée priced across bottle formats, delivery zones and two channels (wholesale and delivered), then split again per distribution agent — each agent carries a territory and only sees the producers assigned to them.
The work was bursty. For months nobody touched it; then every January it swallowed weeks — reissuing the year's tariffs (valid 1 February), plus ad-hoc changes whenever an agent was added or dropped, changed producers, or simply lost their sheet.
Over the years the cross-tab formulas had drifted and broken, so before each send someone re-checked every agent's sheet by hand. Rounding nudged prices a cent at a time until it added up to real, visible gaps — and laying out each agent's branded PDF took forever.
Our approach
We modelled it once, as a single source of truth edited through an export → edit → re-import round-trip. The import is exhaustive — it replaces the list — so every import is backed up and last year's tariffs stay one click away.
A formula engine computes the expected price for each zone and format from a starting price, and flags every spot where the real price drifts from it, so a manual slip is caught the moment it happens. Crucially it warns, it doesn't take over: the estate applies the suggestion or keeps a deliberate exception. A cuvée that's briefly out of stock is hidden, not deleted, ready to come back in a later vintage.
Distribution became a few clicks: tick which producers and zones an agent gets, and their branded PDF price list (logo, legal notices) regenerates to match — wholesale and delivered as separate files. Agents can log in and pull their own up-to-date lists instead of waiting on an emailed Excel, and every change ships with a recap of what was added, updated or removed.
Results
90+ → 1
interlinked spreadsheet tabs consolidated into one application
Warns, you decide
every price that drifts from the formula is flagged, but the estate keeps the final call
Self-serve
agents pull their own branded, up-to-date price lists instead of an emailed Excel
Stack
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