Check supplier price lists and BOM cost impact with Claude and data tables

Quick overview

This workflow lets you upload a supplier price list (PDF, XLSX, or CSV), compares it to previously accepted supplier prices stored in n8n Data Tables, calculates the cost impact on your products using a bill of materials, and generates an Anthropic Claude negotiation brief.

How it works

1. Receives a form submission with the supplier name, price list file, validity date, and whether the list is a full list or a partial update.
2. Detects whether the uploaded file is a PDF, Excel, or CSV and extracts price rows (using Anthropic Claude for PDFs and for spreadsheet column mapping).
3. Normalizes units and parses prices to a comparable “price per base unit”, flagging unreadable rows, unknown units, and (for PDFs) rows that cannot be verified against the extracted PDF text.
4. Loads the last accepted prices and your BOM lines from n8n Data Tables and compares the new list to identify increases, decreases, new items, and discontinued items.
5. If any changes look risky (for example unit/currency changes, large jumps, or possible code replacements), prompts you in a second form to accept or reject those specific rows.
6. Applies accepted changes to the BOM to calculate per-product and annual material cost impact, writes updated supplier prices and a change log to n8n Data Tables, and (when there are notable increases) uses Anthropic Claude to draft a short negotiation brief.
7. Displays a final results page summarizing price changes, product cost impact, items to fix, and the negotiation brief.

Setup

1. Run the “Initialize Tables” path once to create the n8n Data Tables: supplier_prices, price_change_log, and bom_lines.
2. Populate the bom_lines table with your product structure (product_code, supplier, supplier_sku, qty_per_product, base_unit, and optional annual_volume) and ensure supplier names match what you enter in the upload form.
3. Add an Anthropic credential for the Claude steps and select an available Claude model.
4. Review the thresholds and defaults in the Set Processing Parameters node (currency, alert/review thresholds, CSV encoding, and brief language) to match your process.
5. Activate the workflow and use the form URL to upload a known price list once to establish a baseline for each supplier before running future comparisons.

Requirements

• n8n with Data Tables (tested on n8n 2.8.4) and an Anthropic API key

Customization

• Add an email trigger to pick up price lists that arrive by mail, or send the results page to Slack or email.

Additional info

PDF price lists need a text layer; scanned PDFs stop with a message asking for the Excel or CSV version. Currency conversion and quantity-based tiered prices are not handled.