We are pleased to announce that our MD Andrew Butt has been shortlisted for the EY UK Entrepreneur of the Year (2018) Midlands awards in their "Disruptor" category for its DealTrack innovation.*

With increasing global competition, ever-more complex trading agreements are being created.

Effective management and control of complex trading agreements that include supplier rebates is notoriously difficult. Most standard accounting and purchasing software packages will not cope with the variety and complexity of pricing strategies and rebate agreements.

But a solution that is disjointed or based on spreadsheets introduces the possibility of missing data, human error and inaccurate reporting.

Working with a number of organisations across industry sectors such as building materials, buying groups and wholesale and distribution, we have seen a large variety of very complex supplier rebates and trading agreements.  These very often involve incredibly complicated performance-based calculations with seemingly endless permutations, and on top of that agreements are subject to periodic review and change.

Profitability for suppliers to the building industry — including building materials, plumbing, HVAC and electrical distributors — is often very closely dependent on the amount of rebate they can negotiate and claim.

A ship and debit agreement enables suppliers to sell their goods at a uniform price, while distributors can react to local market conditions and lower the price they use to sell to customers without losing all of their margin.

We’re seeing more and more evidence of companies who rely on their suppliers to tell them what rebates they should claim!

This is surprising given that rebates can be the largest contributor to profit for buying groups and a significant percentage for companies in the building materials, retail and wholesale distribution sectors.

This may raise a few Financial Directors’ eyebrows, but given the complexity of rebate deals in some organisations and the lack of robust systems to track purchases against those contracts, it’s no wonder that some companies struggle to understand what rebate claims they should be making.

If profit is the most important word in the business world then trust must run it a very close second. In the new collaborative economy the trust between businesses and their trading partners is key to their ability to move forward as one with transparency.

A damning report from the Groceries Code Adjudicator (GCA), has today seen Tesco, Britain’s biggest supermarket chain, pay the price for poor supplier rebate management, after delaying supplier payments and failing to raise accurate invoices.

Tesco’s accounting scandal has brought the importance of the collaborative economy and the consequences of falling short in collaborative business planning into focus.

Landmark Wholesale Buying Group is a major buying group that provides a centralised trading and marketing operation on behalf of its members — leading independent wholesalers. The group represents members throughout the UK and has a turnover of £1.8 billion. One of their key roles is to organise the complex process of managing member overrider payments.