Your sales team is quoting last year’s pricing.
Nobody decided to quote the old price. It was just the version the rep found first.
1. How it happens
Pricing changes in one file. The deck, the one-pager, the saved reply and the proposal template do not — each copy goes out of date on its own schedule, and nothing tells anybody which one did.
A rep under time pressure uses whichever turns up first. So does any assistant they ask.
2. An old source is worse than none
An answer with an old source is worse than no answer, because it gets used.
A rep who cannot find the price asks somebody. A rep who finds last year’s price quotes it, and the retraction costs more than the question would have.
3. Ask the record, get the source
The internal authority agent is built to answer staff from the repository — what can we claim, what is approved, what is the current figure, what is stale — and to name the file behind each answer.
In our example, asked the current price, it answers $60 and names pricing.md. It is designed to say so when a source is out of date, rather than answer around it.
4. Figures expire
A dated figure expires twelve months after its date. A figure with no date is expired now.
How long a figure stays current
It is the rule we hold our own record to: staleness is a date, not a judgement call.
