The Nitty Gritty

Most trade promotion management tools are software products that require constant input from the brand’s sales and finance team.

The brand first needs to enter all the details of their promo calendar with information relating to the discount offered, the lift expected, the SKUs involved, and continually update it as new promotions get booked.

Once the promo calendar is in and the promotion is running, the brand starts getting paid by their customers less deductions taken against the promotions and for other reasons.

The customers send backup documents detailing the reason for the deductions but often fail to send all of the documents.

Ultimately, the brand needs to reconcile the invoices paid less deduction documents received and determine what deduction documents are missing and request them.

This is a simple bookkeeping process but it often is done by highly paid member of the brand team.

Some software providers offer document retrieval services and some do not.

The brand may need to request missing documents from the customer and these requests are often numerous and time-consuming.

Depending on the product used, you may need to decide what type of deduction document you are working with and then choose that type before you upload it.

Brands get hundreds of these documents a month so this becomes a tedious and time-consuming process.

The uploaded document then gets converted into usable information and the software tries to match each line item to a specific promotion.

This often fails because the deductions: don’t relate to promotions at all such as slotting/free fill/overpull/short shelf life/damages/wrong quantity. fall outside of the expected date range because the retailer executed on different dates than anticipated. refer to your product by a slightly different version of the name and the software doesn’t recognize it. were from a promo that never got entered into the promo calendar.

This often happens with smaller retailers and promos organized by the broker rather than the brand. is not related to the brand at all and requires dispute.

The brand must then invest time to address each of these issues.

They need to: manually match the deduction to an existing promotion create a new promotion that they failed to initially enter assign the line item to a non-promo trade spend category such as slotting/free fill/overpull/short shelf life/damages/wrong quantity assign the line item to a non trade spend category such as “to be disputed”

After all the deductions are entered and matched, the brand then needs to review how much they had budgeted for each promotion, determine if all the deductions have been accounted for and finally adjust their books to account for any differences from forecast to actual spent.

They may also want to update their forecast for future promotions with the same retailer based on their experience.

Each of these steps is crucial to close out the promotion on the brand’s books. Finally, for erroneous or disputable charges, you need to gather documentation including the customer’s purchase order, the warehouse’s pick ticket, the freight carrier’s bill of lading, the related invoice, and fill out a form provided by the customer and submit.

You then need to review submissions, sometimes provide additional information, acknowledge repayment or accept that no repayment is coming, and account for any amounts that are not recoverable.

This again, is a time-consuming process.

Wouldn’t you like to have someone in your back office that does ALL of the above?

Wouldn’t you just like to know that you had a dedicated back office team member assigned to your brand who can manage 99% of the above and only come to you for clarification?

That’s what we do.