The add-on price file
One price file inherited from an acquired company, kept at the close because pulling it would have broken service and never converted since, is still the record the next order to an acquired account prices through, so the integration is done on the org chart and in the consolidation but not in the file the order actually runs.
An order came in this week from one of the acquired accounts, a regional fabrication shop that has bought from the branch for years. Four lines, all stock items off the account’s standing tier: a run of plate, two sizes of structural tube, a box of consumables. Freight delivered to its dock, dated net 45, the prices the ones it has always seen. It priced the way it always has, off the file that came across at the close, at the terms the account held before the deal. It released, shipped, and invoiced, and no one opened the file, because it is the file that account has always priced from.
On the org chart the two companies have been one for a year. The consolidation reconciles to one set of books. The leadership line is single, and the board sees one company. The price file that order ran through is still the acquired company’s, with the pre-close logic exactly where it was at the close.
The file was kept on purpose. At the close the acquired accounts expected their old prices, their old freight, the treatment they had always had, and pulling the file would have changed what they were charged before anyone had decided what they should be charged. Changing what an acquired account pays in the first week of new ownership is a service failure at the most fragile point of the hold. So the file stayed, as a bridge, to hold those accounts through the transition. That was the right call.
A year on, the bridge is still the file the order prices through. It holds the acquired company’s pricing for those accounts and the commitments that came with it, exactly as they stood. The freight line on this account is delivered, prepaid to its dock, set when the acquired company ran its own trucks on that lane and never repriced when the combined business moved to a 3PL. The dating is net 45, where the combined business’s own book settled on net 30 after the close. There is a standing 8 percent off list on one product class, a discount the acquired company carried for this account that the combined book no longer offers anyone else. It is a complete, working record of how the acquired company priced, frozen at the close and still running. When the account orders, the quote reads the file, the order releases at those terms, and the invoice clears clean against it. Every line matches what the file says the account pays, the freight allowance comes off where the file puts it, the dating prints net 45, and nothing on the document disagrees with anything else, because the invoice is checked against the file and the file is what it has always been. The file does its job perfectly. Nothing in the order path asks whether this is still the price the combined business would set. The file answers, and the order moves.
And nothing forces the question. The accounts are satisfied. Service holds. The consolidation reconciles, the org chart is clean, and the integration was reported done. No signal anywhere says this file is still the acquired company’s. So the temporary bridge has quietly become the standing record, and the order keeps pricing off the company that was bought.
No one converted the file because once the integration was reported done, converting it was no one’s task, and nothing about it ever broke. The integration was tracked to the org chart and the ledger, and those finished, so the program closed. The record the order prices through was never on the completion list. It sat between the close-out of the integration program and the daily order path, owned by neither. The obvious read from the chair is that the integration is done, the consolidation reconciled, the synergy case was booked, so this is closed. But the consolidation reconciles because it sums two ledgers into one, which it does whether or not the order prices off the combined business’s own logic. The org chart being one and the price file being the acquired company’s are not in conflict. The integration is done in the records that get reviewed. It is not done in the record that prices the order. A file that is on a phase-two list and is also pricing every acquired order today is not parked, it is live, and the later phase has no trigger, because nothing about the file breaks, so it keeps yielding to the work that does. The quiet is why it never gets settled.
So there are two records of the same event. One says the acquisition is integrated. The other, the one the order prices through, says it is not, and it has been saying so, faithfully, since the close.
The integration is done everywhere it was tracked. In the one record the order runs through, the company is still being priced by the company that bought it.
The integration closed everywhere it was tracked and stayed open in the one file the order prices through. Which add-on is still being run by the company you bought, and whether that can be settled inside the hold, is the read the rest of this page is for. That is the condition this one file is an instance of.