The before-you-share checklist I use so a competitor price sheet still matches the source pages

A price sheet can look finished while its source story is already wrong: a copied price is still labeled “current” after the page changed; a dollar amount has no currency or billing period; three tiers are squeezed into one feature cell; a row for your own product sits in the competitor section; or a screenshot is doing all the talking with no URL behind it.

Before-you-send is different from mid-price cleanup. This is the pass I run when the sheet is about to leave my hands and someone else may treat every cell as what the source pages actually showed.

I am Brittany Bonds, a freelancer admin helper. I turn messy competitor URL lists into clean price-comparison sheets. I am not a CPA, bookkeeper, lawyer, tax advisor, pricing strategist, or competitive-intelligence analyst, and this is not financial, tax, legal, pricing-strategy, or competitive-intelligence advice. It is an administrative source-checking routine, not a recommendation about what anyone should charge, buy, or do.

This complements The mid-price checklist I use so a competitor price sheet stays honest. That live #83 post covers the cleanup pass while the price dump is being built. This third pass is the pre-share evidence check. I found no published first-pass competitor-URLs article in the local records or Dev.to API, so this is not a rewrite of one.

What “honest enough to share” looks like

• Every price claim has a source URL, capture date, and status: current, stale, discontinued, unavailable, or needs confirmation.
• Currency and billing period are explicit: USD per month, EUR per year, per seat, one-time, quote-only, and so on.
• A tier row represents the tier the page names; features are not mashed into one confident cell.
• Competitor rows are separate from my own product, internal benchmarks, and possible alternatives.
• Screenshot-only claims are labeled until a reachable URL or limitation note exists.
• VAT, sales tax, and other tax treatment are not silently presented as part of, or excluded from, universal list price.
• Affiliate, referral, coupon, launch, and limited-time prices are labeled as offers, not standard pricing.

If the only share instruction is “send the green price column,” pre-share honesty has already slipped.

The before-you-send checklist

Use this against the near-final sheet and live evidence: pricing and plan pages, terms or FAQ pages, saved screenshots, exports, and the old sheet if there is one. The goal is not to make every row complete. The goal is to make uncertainty visible before the sheet becomes someone else’s source of truth.

1. Freeze freshness and source status

• [ ] Every price claim has a source URL or is labeled screenshot-only, unverified, or ask — no orphan number gets a current-looking cell.
• [ ] Capture date or last-checked date is present for every source row — “I copied it last month” is not a freshness rule.
• [ ] A changed page is labeled stale until checked again; a 404, redirect, paywall, login wall, or unavailable page keeps that status — do not rebuild a live offer from memory.
• [ ] A discontinued product or archived plan is labeled discontinued / historical and kept out of the live competitor section.
• [ ] The share view has one clear as-of rule, or a visible date per row — not a mixture that looks like one simultaneous market snapshot.
• [ ] Skim test: a reader can tell whether each row describes what the page shows now, showed at capture, or still needs confirmation.

A stale price is not automatically useless. It is a historical or unverified observation. The misleading part is leaving it dressed as today’s standard price.

2. Make each price interpretable

• [ ] Currency is written beside the amount or in a clearly inherited header — $29 without USD, CAD, AUD, or another currency is not self-explanatory.
• [ ] Billing period and unit are explicit — monthly, annual, per seat, per user, per project, one-time, usage-based, and quote-only should not flatten into “price.”
• [ ] Annual-prepay and month-to-month amounts remain distinguishable — do not compare an annual-equivalent figure with a monthly checkout amount as if identical.
• [ ] VAT, sales tax, GST, or other tax treatment is noted when relevant — tax-inclusive, tax-exclusive, tax-at-checkout, or not stated are different observations.
• [ ] Tax ambiguity stays not stated / ask; it is not silently treated as part of list price or stripped out to make rows line up.
• [ ] Currency conversions, if shown, are labeled as conversions with their date and method — a converted figure is not the source page’s list price.
• [ ] Skim test: a reader can say exactly what the amount means without guessing the period.

This is a context check, not tax or financial advice. I am recording what the page disclosed, not deciding how a price should be analyzed.

3. Keep tiers, features, and row types honest

• [ ] The plan or tier name matches the page — guessed labels such as “Pro-ish” stay guess / ask, not official names.
• [ ] Separate tiers stay separate rows when price or included features differ — do not merge Basic, Pro, and Enterprise into one “subscription” cell.
• [ ] Feature notes identify their tier; “included,” “add-on,” “limited,” “not stated,” and “not included” stay distinct — an empty cell is not a checkmark.
• [ ] Feature comparisons are like-for-like or labeled apples-to-oranges / ask; quote-only, custom, contact-sales, and usage-priced offers remain different from published list prices.
• [ ] Competitor rows use a stated inclusion rule, while my own product, internal target, client’s current plan, and “possible alternative” rows are separate or clearly labeled — do not mix them into a competitor ranking.
• [ ] Duplicate URLs and aliases are consolidated or marked duplicate — one offer is not several competitors because it appeared in several tabs.
• [ ] Skim test: sorting by tier shows the actual plan structure, not a super-row borrowing the strongest claims from every tier.

A price sheet is not more useful because it has fewer rows. If compression changes what the page said, it is a tidy error.

4. Label screenshots, promotions, and final gaps

• [ ] Screenshots have their original URL, capture date, and context when available — a screenshot alone does not prove a currently reachable page.
• [ ] Claims visible only in an image, ad, search result, affiliate page, or social post are labeled by evidence type — they do not silently become the vendor’s standard list price.
• [ ] Affiliate, referral, partner, coupon, launch, student, nonprofit, annual-prepay, and limited-time amounts are labeled by condition — do not call a conditional offer “standard.”
• [ ] Trial, free, freemium, and introductory periods are separate from paid renewal price; if standard price is missing, it stays not stated / ask — do not backsolve it.
• [ ] Missing currency, billing period, tier identity, tax treatment, or source URL stays visible as ask / not stated / incomplete — blanks do not become certainty at send time.
• [ ] Discontinued, stale, screenshot-only, and promo rows are separated from the live comparison or clearly labeled in it.
• [ ] The share view does not imply a complete market census, recommendation, or competitive-intelligence conclusion.
• [ ] Raw screenshots, scratch notes, and unresolved conflicts are out of the clean view but retained in the evidence trail.
• [ ] Final skim: I can answer “what page supports this cell, what did it show, and what conditions apply?” for every share-ready row.

If a row fails one of these checks, I would rather send a visible needs confirmation label than make the sheet look complete by guessing.

Soft CTA

If you have competitor URLs and want them organized into a price-comparison sheet, pricecompare on Gumroad is $12. Code ADMIN12 takes $2 off. Browse the full shop or the catalog mirror on GitHub Pages.

Not a CPA. Not financial, tax, legal, pricing-strategy, or competitive-intelligence advice — just an admin checklist for keeping a shared price sheet tied to what its source pages actually showed.