Making good business decisions is a critical part of every executive’s job and is vital to every company’s success. Yet in a McKinsey Global Survey,only 20% of respondents said that their organizations excel at decision making and the majority said that much of their time they devote to making business decisions is used ineffectively. On average, over half of respondent’s admitted to spending more than 30% of their working time on decision making activities.

Throughout the rebate management process, business decisions have to be made constantly, but due to teams relying on manual, legacy systems, or exporting rebate data from disparate systems, the business decisions made are not always the right ones. To support better business decisions, modern technology like rebate management software gives organizations the ability to upload their data and monitor and measure the progress of their deals meaning they can make informed business decisions quickly and efficiently.

Rebate management software can help you make better business decisions by providing:

1. A single source of the truth

Rebate management software creates a single source of accurate data. You don’t have to worry about mismatched, outdated or duplicate data being funnelled in from various sources. Rather, everyone works with the same information, meaning at any time you are able to get an accurate, up to date picture of your deals. If you are trying to make business decisions off of incomplete or outdated rebate data, then chances are your business decisions won’t be good.

2. Accurate and timely deal insights

The need for all your deal information to be delivered in a collaborative fashion to all relative parties has never been greater. Rebate management software gives you accurate and timely insights of your deals which helps stakeholders to proactively make adjustments and observations at any time. Coupled with the ability to drill into the finer details behind the information, this gives rebate professionals the data they need in order to make the best business decisions.

3. Better reporting capabilities

Organizations that don’t have a rebate management system tend to tackle reporting in an ad hoc fashion, maybe doing it once a month, once a quarter or once a year. One of the main reasons for this is because manual reporting is so time consuming. However, infrequent reporting is useless to your organization when you need to make business decisions immediately. You need to be able to collect and assemble meaningful rebate data right when you need it. Rebate data from 6 months ago, or even one month ago just isn’t going to cut it.

With modern rebate management software in place, you no longer have to wait for reports and analysis from various departments before receiving a full picture of your deals. Instead, all the crucial information you need is presented in a comprehensive manner at your disposal. In turn, this allows key decision makers to identify specific areas for concern, where you can improve and can help with future negotiations. All of this enables your organization to make better business decisions.

4. Real-time, quality data

As your business and deals grows, the day-to-day activity and the operation as a whole become drastically more complex. Getting the right information to the right person at the pace your business demands can make a difference between closing or losing a deal.

Relying on manual processes, such as spreadsheets for data entry can cause costly errors, which reduces the quality of the company’s data as a whole. This in turn affects the business decisions being made. It’s crucial for your data to be all in real-time and at the highest quality, with few or no mistakes.

Organizations that rely on rebate management software experience eliminate common time-consuming mistakes like data re-entry and instead have access to real-time, quality data around their deals. So, they can make immediate and better business decisions about how to pivot what they’re doing, leading to greater financial performance and improved operational efficiency.

5. Automation

Smart organizations know that by automating their deals with the help of rebate management software, their team can be freed up from repetitive tasks and use their newfound time to make better business decisions, without breaking out the calculator every time. The faster you can decide on the right response to an opportunity or risk of a deal, and consistently act on it, the better the business outcome will be.

6. Workflows and alerts

When it comes to making better business decisions around your deals, you want to be alerted straight away if an issue occurs or a change needs to be made. That’s why rebate management software like Enable has built in automatic approval workflows and alerts. This means that the monitoring of your trading agreements and the distribution of notifications and alerts can remove the manual processing involved in providing up-to-date information to the relevant people.

There you have it! Modern, cloud-based rebate management software has revolutionized the decision-making process by giving organizations the tools and insights they need to make the best business decisions possible. With our comprehensive features including reporting and forecasting tools you can access high quality rebate data and measure deal performance like never before.