Pricing and Finance
Structuring pricing rules and financial visibility for large SKU portfolios since 2018
Business need
At AkzoNobel, more than 1,100 SKUs were priced individually with no shared rules. The price list method required handling dozens of tax combinations across Brazil’s 27 states, markups were inconsistent by product family, and SAP entries were manual. The full pricing update cycle typically took about 30 days, which increased errors, rework, and strategic drift.
Another issue emerged at one of the companies I worked for, where the finance backbone was essentially non-existent. Cash inflows and expenses were recorded manually in physical ledgers, dividends were not consistently recorded, and there was no product-level P&L or multi-year spend history. As a result, profitability, margin, and valuation could not be assessed with confidence.
Finally, related operational gaps compounded the problem: the measurement of ad-hoc commercial campaigns was unreliable, a stopgap price simulator was used by the Sales Team to build budgets during client negotiations, and managing hundreds of product listings and ads across marketplaces such as Amazon and Mercado Livre was difficult, often leading to inconsistent pricing and content.
My role and contributions
I built a pricing calculator with a clear master–related item logic. Set the price of the master and the rules flowed to the linked SKUs. Markups were no longer guesswork: they followed simple rules by pack size and chemical composition, so higher-margin items received higher markups. I also put governance in place with validations, versioning, and an audit log. After approval, the tool wrote the change log and generated the SAP upload file automatically, cutting cycle time and manual errors while keeping pricing consistent.
For the finance gap, I created a cash-flow and P&L tool that centralized every inflow and expense and mapped them to a clean chart of accounts. It produced monthly P&L by product and family, along with trends and visual dashboards. With eight years of history loaded, leadership finally had a solid view of profitability and trajectory, which made budgeting, variance checks, and scenario planning straightforward.
To close the remaining operational gaps, I added a campaign performance tracker that pulled results directly from our database, calculated outcomes automatically, and highlighted target gaps. For marketplaces, I built a monitor for Amazon and Mercado Livre that tracked hundreds of SKUs, enabled quick A/B tests, and flagged issues for Sales, replacing manual work and improving data quality.
