Catalog Product Price Checking

I’m new here and am NOT a scripter, so I’m hoping someone can help with this.

I am the creative director at a company that currently produces 27 catalogs four times a year. In addition to myself, I have a staff of five to do this work. We currently use a commercial plug-in that allows us to “tag” each price in the catalogs (between 120 and 380 pages with anywhere from 4,000 items in the smallest to more than 12,000 in the largest) using its part number as the variable. We can then “run” the plug-in and it cross reference a spreadsheet with all the current part numbers and their prices and changes the prices to those in the spreadsheet. It also can report if the part has been discontinued or if there is no matching part number in the spreadsheet.

Not being a scripter, and after using this plug-in for six years now, it seems like nothing more than a glorified script with a “pretty” interface. The plug-in does offer many options (the use of a different “price style” where desired, the ability to ignore characters before or after the price itself, etc.), but we could live without those if I could find a script that could do the same thing (or close to it).

We are now using InDesign CC on five Macs (running OS 10.6.8) and one Windows 7 computer. I’m not sure if that makes a difference or not.

Can anyone point me in the direction of a script that could accomplish this same task, or maybe something close? I have no idea where to look…

I appreciate your help,
Lloyd