QuickBooks Online Won’t Tell You When You’re Underpricing — Here’s How to Know

QuickBooks Online is great at tracking sales, expenses, and financial reports. Many product-based businesses rely on it as their single source of truth. But there’s a dangerous assumption that quietly costs businesses money every day:

If pricing is wrong, QuickBooks will tell me.

Unfortunately, that’s not how it works.

For businesses managing hundreds or thousands of SKUs — especially those with regularly changing costs — underpricing often happens silently. Sales can look healthy, revenue may even be growing, yet profits slowly erode without any clear warning inside QuickBooks Online.

Here’s why — and how to catch it before it gets expensive.

What QuickBooks Online Actually Does (and Doesn’t Do)

QuickBooks Online does an excellent job of recording what already happened:

• Sales transactions

• Vendor bills and landed costs

• Inventory valuation

• Historical gross margin reports

But what it does not do is just as important.

QuickBooks Online does not:

• Alert you when costs rise but prices don’t

• Monitor margin drift over time

• Flag underpriced SKUs

• Identify margin leaks caused by outdated pricing

• Compare cost changes to selling prices automatically

By the time a margin issue shows up on a report, the damage is often already done.

Why Underpricing Is So Hard to Spot for Product-Based Businesses

Underpricing is especially common for businesses that:

• Carry large inventories

• Update vendor costs frequently

• Manage pricing in spreadsheets outside QuickBooks

• Use bulk pricing or customer-specific pricing

• Rely on manual SKU-by-SKU updates

When costs change — shipping, materials, supplier increases — prices don’t always get updated at the same time. Sometimes they don’t get updated at all.

The result? You keep selling products profitably on paper, but margins quietly shrink with every sale.

6 Signs You’re Underpricing (Even If Sales Look Fine)

Here are common red flags we see in QuickBooks Online data:

1. Margins Slowly Trending Down

Sales stay flat or grow, but gross margin percentage declines month after month.

2. Best-Selling Products Have the Lowest Margins

High-volume SKUs often hide the biggest pricing problems.

3. Costs Were Updated — Prices Were Not

Vendor cost changes were entered, but selling prices stayed the same.

4. Discounts Become the New Normal

Temporary discounts quietly turn into permanent pricing.

5. More Sales, Same Cash Pressure

You need more volume just to maintain the same cash flow.

6. Pricing Lives Outside QuickBooks

Spreadsheets or disconnected systems drive pricing decisions, creating lag and mismatches.

If any of these sound familiar, you’re likely underpricing — even if QuickBooks hasn’t raised a red flag.

What You Can Do Today to Catch Underpricing (No New Software Yet)

Before adding new tools, here are practical steps you can take right now:

✔ Review Your Top 20 SKUs Monthly

Focus on the products that drive the most revenue — small margin changes here have the biggest impact.

✔ Compare Cost Change Dates to Price Change Dates

If costs changed months ago but prices didn’t, you’ve found a profit leak.

✔ Look at Margin by Product, Not Just Overall

Overall margins can look fine while individual SKUs lose money.

✔ Audit Bulk & Customer-Specific Pricing

These are often updated once — and then forgotten.

✔ Flag Any SKU Below Target Margin

Even a 2–3% gap compounds quickly at scale.

These steps help — but they’re manual, time-consuming, and hard to maintain as inventory grows.

Where Most Businesses Get Stuck

As inventory and complexity increase, pricing oversight breaks down because:

• There’s no automated visibility into margin drift

• Pricing reviews fall behind daily operations

• Spreadsheet tracking doesn’t scale

• QuickBooks reports are backward-looking, not preventative

This is exactly where underpricing becomes invisible.

How The Pricing Assistant Helps (Without Replacing QuickBooks)

The Pricing Assistant works alongside QuickBooks Online to solve what QBO can’t:

• Identifies pricing issues and margin leaks

• Highlights products at risk of underpricing

• Connects cost changes to pricing impact

• Helps businesses manage pricing across large inventories

• Supports ongoing margin management — not one-time reviews

You still use QuickBooks Online.You just gain visibility into what it doesn’t surface.

👉 See how it works:https://www.thepricingassistant.com/demo

👉 Learn more about pricing & margin analysis:https://www.thepricingassistant.com

Final Thought: Underpricing Rarely Happens All at Once

Margins don’t usually collapse overnight. They leak — quietly, gradually, and unnoticed.

If you rely on QuickBooks Online alone to catch pricing issues, you’re likely seeing them too late. A proactive pricing review process is the difference between growing revenue and protecting profit.

If you want help identifying underpricing before it shows up on your financials, The Pricing Assistant was built for exactly that.