Fintech is the Diamond Sponsor for PDI Connections Live 2026. You can visit their booth in the Expo and add the session “Rethinking Supply Chains: Why Ordering is Replacing Traditional DSD” to your Connections Live agenda on Monday, August 24.
The average convenience store carries thousands of SKUs, with shelf pricing potentially changing hundreds of times a month. Consider that across a multi-location chain, and the product data (cost, pack size, UPC, vendor item number) behind every one of those changes has to be right, every time, at a speed no manual process can keep up with. For convenience stores looking to protect margins across thousands of SKUs, that data is only as useful as it is accurate.
The gap between what’s happening on the shelf and what’s happening in the back office is where margin quietly erodes. Perhaps there is a promotional allowance that expired but never left the price book, or a vendor cost increase that hasn’t synced yet, or maybe a pack size or UPC change that is still showing outdated data. Any one of these can mean the price a customer sees on the shelf no longer reflects what’s true, and the business absorbs the difference without it ever showing up as a single, obvious loss.
Despite all this, it’s not the errors themselves that cost the most. It’s the hours spent finding them, correcting them, and translating them back into an accurate price on the shelf.
“As retailers spend enormous effort analyzing margins, they’re overlooking the underlying data that determines them,” says Mark Kimber, Senior Vice President of Sales at Fintech, an integrated platform that connects ordering, invoicing, payments, product, pricing, and operational data through proprietary automation. “Protecting margin is no longer just about negotiating better costs at the back door, but having accurate, timely data that allows operators to be more agile in making profitable merchandising decisions.”
For chains running PDI’s back-office platform, that agility depends on the catalog and invoice data feeding into it being just as reliable as the system itself.
The cost of a disconnected catalog
Kimber notes that the average c-store carries between 5,500 and 7,500 SKUs, with prices changing anywhere from 250 to 350 times a month. Multiply that velocity across thousands of items, hundreds of vendors, and dozens or hundreds of locations, and even small inconsistencies compound fast.
Every retailer knows the exceptions by name, whether it is a UPC that doesn’t match, a pack size that changed without notice, or a promotional allowance that expired but never left the price book. Individually, they look like rounding errors, but at scale, they show up as margin loss, out-of-stocks, and staff time spent chasing down discrepancies instead of managing the business.
“If even 8% of your SKUs show up in an exception bucket because the invoice detail is not aligning to the price book information, you’re liable to add staff to chase it all down,” says a multi-location convenience store operator.
These exceptions increase headcount and hours spent reconciling data, instead of building the assortment and pricing strategy that grows the business.
How Fintech and PDI work together
Fintech helps close that gap before it ever reaches the shelf. Rather than product and invoice data arriving in fragments, Fintech centralizes vendor submissions, validates them against the retailer’s master catalog, and continuously identifies variances in cost, description, UPC, and pack size.
For chains on PDI, that means the data flowing into the back-office system has already been checked. Instead of category managers discovering a pricing discrepancy after it’s been live at the register for days, exceptions are surfaced and resolved before they ever reach the shelf. Once an update is approved, it flows back into the retailer’s PDI environment automatically, without manual re-entry.
This creates a single, connected view where the catalog data behind the register matches what’s being invoiced, in real time, across every location.
One catalog, fewer blind spots
For convenience stores using PDI, the goal is making sure the systems already in place are working from the same accurate, real-time information. Invoice-native validation is what makes the PDI dashboard trustworthy in the first place. Instead of pricing and inventory data arriving from disconnected sources, retailers get one validated source of truth flowing straight through, closing the gap between what’s ordered, what’s invoiced, and what’s on the shelf.
“Pricing may seem like a game of pennies, but it adds up,” Kimber says. “Most importantly, we see that retailers who proactively address data issues have less cleanup, which allows category managers to pivot from being data administrators and devote their time to the assortment design and margin management that leads to profitable growth. The result is a better return on both your margins and your team’s time.”
Ready to see what a connected catalog looks like inside your PDI environment? Connect with us to learn how we give convenience retailers a clean, continuously validated foundation for pricing, margin protection, and operational efficiency.
Still not registered for Connections Live 2026?
The conference is almost here, so register today!
