Find Prices in Supplier Price Lists with AI

The everyday question

"What does this door cost us?" In a wholesale or trade business the answer sits in a supplier's price list: a 200-page PDF or an Excel sheet, one of several versions, in one of hundreds of supplier folders. Finding it takes minutes; finding the current one takes experience.

With AnythingMCP File Search, your AI assistant does the search and shows its work: which supplier folder, which list, which page or row, and how old the list is.

Set up once

1. Organise the share the way you already do: one folder per supplier, current lists in the folder, superseded lists in a subfolder such as Old or Archive.
2. Connect it to AnythingMCP as a File Search connector:
   • self-hosted: mount the share and add a File Search connector of type Network folder (how);
   • Cloud: expose it through SFTP, FTPS or WebDAV (how).
3. Exclude the old versions: add **/Old/** and **/Archive*/** to the exclusions. The assistant then cannot quote a superseded price.
4. Name the tool prefix after the content, for example pricelists, and give the connector instructions such as: "One folder per supplier, named <Supplier> - <supplier number>. Prices are list prices unless the file name says net."
5. Connect your AI client to the MCP server: Claude, ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, Gemini, Cursor and Meta Muse.
6. Give it to the right role. Purchase conditions are often confidential: put this connector only on the MCP server or role of purchasing and sales.

How the assistant finds a price

Ask: "What is the list price of Nordtor NT-601 875 x 2000?"

1. pricelists_find looks for the supplier folder and the price list files in it, with their dates.
2. pricelists_grep searches the article code literally. In Excel lists every row is indexed with its column names, so a hit returns the whole row: article, dimensions, price.
3. pricelists_read opens the matching PDF page to confirm the table and the footnotes (surcharges, validity, price unit).
4. The assistant answers with the price, the file, the page or row and the date of the list, and warns when the list is older than twelve months.

If two lists match, it uses the newest and says which one it skipped.

Prompts for the team

• "What does NT-601 875 x 2000 cost in the current Nordtor list? Name the file and the page."
• "Compare the price of article 4711-200 in the 2025 and 2026 lists from the same supplier."
• "Which suppliers have a price list older than one year in their folder?"
• "Find the surcharge for RAL colours in the conditions of supplier Kessler."
• "Give me the current price list of supplier 70123 as a download link."

Why keyword search beats vector search here

Price lists are full of codes, dimensions and numbers that look alike. A search "by meaning" happily returns NT-602 for NT-601, or last year's list because its wording is closer to the question. AnythingMCP searches the text literally and page by page and returns dates with every hit, so the model can pick the exact row and the current document, and show you where it is.

Good to know

• List price vs. customer price. The file share holds supplier list and purchase prices. A customer's net price after discounts belongs in your ERP; connect it as a separate connector and ask the assistant to combine both.
• Scanned price lists without a text layer need OCR (Enterprise).
• Large lists are read page by page, so a 500-page PDF does not fill the chat.
• Changes are picked up on the next sync: daily on Starter and Team, down to every 15 minutes on Enterprise Cloud and every 5 minutes on self-hosted Enterprise. An administrator can also press Sync now after dropping in a new list.

Related

• Search your company file server with AI
• Search inside Nextcloud and WebDAV files with AI
• Share files from an AI chat as download links
• File sources one by one, in Claude: SFTP, FTP / FTPS, WebDAV, S3 bucket, Nextcloud, ownCloud, Synology NAS, QNAP NAS, Fritz!Box storage, Hetzner Storage Box, network folder (self-hosted)
• Connect an FTP or SFTP server to Claude, ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, Gemini, Cursor or Muse