Ah yes, rebate claims. An evil necessary in the land of SPAs (special price agreements). While they’re inherently necessary to realize intended profit on the sales transaction, they’re a pain in our side when it comes to handling the issues that plague the reconciliation process.

But the process of reconciling product rebate claims is full of information that is largely dismissed, not getting any attention to the voice that tells us the very issues we continue to tolerate rather than fix. Let’s take a look at a couple of these issues…

SPAs (Special Pricing Agreements) are a common vendor program in many industry sectors. The program gives a special product discount for verified sales to an ultra-competitive event where in-stock discounts can’t secure the order.

SPAs trace their roots back to the 1970’s but have shown significant growth in the past decade. As B2B e-commerce now counts for an estimated 15% of all orders and grows at 8% per year, SPAs have grown significantly as price and availability are easily and quickly researched.

SPAs are now used by 77% of all distribution firms in North America; second only to volume rebates which are used by 90% of distributors.

SIG is a leading European provider of specialist building materials, with close to £3bn of annual revenues and around 9,000 employees across the UK, Ireland and Mainland Europe. As a specialist distributor, SIG plays a critical role in the construction supply chain, bringing value to its customer base across major European markets.

Whilst many core business systems have some functionality to help monitor trading agreements that involve vendor rebates, most have neither the flexibility nor the extensive range of functionality that is needed to support the increasingly complex world of rebate management.

For many, that lack of functionality has resulted in missed rebates and poor accrual accounting.

But worse than that, if your business systems don’t support rebate management fully, then the whole purpose behind creating deals involving rebates – a means to influence business growth – is missed.

In this blog, we are going to focus on the system requirements for configuring, storing, monitoring, reviewing and operating rebate deals or special pricing agreements. 

For the sake of efficiency and audit tracking, and to avoid unnecessary disputes, all elements of pricing agreements should be stored in one place.  A cloud based solution is ideal for multi-centred operations.

Companies tend to look for specialist rebate management software when they reach a point where their core business systems are proven to be inadequate.

This particularly affects builders' merchants, plumbing distributors, electrical distributors, HVAC distributors and others who operate in the building materials industry.  These businesses usually have to deal with a large number of complex trading agreements involving rebates, special pricing agreements, retrospective discounts, over-riders and more across many thousands of stock items.

We have a buyers' guide that outlines everything you should look for in a Rebate Management System, but I wanted to outline my top 12 features in this blog.

If you’re a builders merchant in 2018 you’ll know how essential it is to ensure every penny counts in terms of your bottom line. So, it’s even more crucial than ever that you don’t miss out on any of the, often significant, sums due to you through rebates.

Indeed, profitability for suppliers to the building industry is often very closely dependent on the amount of rebate they can negotiate and claim and many businesses across this sector tell us that the sheer volume of categories and the complexity of rebate deals means that administering rebate claims is a mission critical element of their business which can be the difference between a decent year and a great one.

100% of our customers have identified previously missed rebate claims after implementing our Dealtrack system and we have even seen cases of missed rebate claims amounting to 7 or even 8 figure sums.

Rebate management is the process of recording supplier agreements, tracking purchases and sales against those agreements, and managing accruals and rebate claims in a timely manner.  This blog and animation cover:

• What is rebate management?

• What is a rebate management system?

• What are the benefits of having a rebate management system?

• What types of company use rebate management systems?

Failing to claim 100% of rebate due can have a large negative impact on the bottom line for businesses in industries where rebate agreements are commonplace.  Finding out why that happens and how to stop missing vendor rebate claims is at the forefront of the minds of rebate accountants and financial leads the world over.