Rebate management blog - Page 16 - Enable

Finance and accounting departments tend to rely on Excel spreadsheets to manage a growing business’s financial data because they know it, they understand it and old habits die hard. But human entry error is always a risk which we saw a few years ago when news about Excel miscalculations at JP Morgan rocked spreadsheet users’ worlds. A simple cut and paste excel error cost JP Morgan $6 billion and resulted in dramatic headlines like “Why Excel is the Most Dangerous Software in the World”, but it...Continue reading

Whatever industry you are involved in, forecasting the potential earnings for your business is essential in preparing for the ups and downs of the year ahead. Although a complex task, forecasting helps you make important decisions about your budget, such as how many employees you can afford to hire or how much you can spend on marketing.

You wouldn’t be able to make these decisions if you don’t know how much revenue and profit, you’d be generating, which is where forecasting comes into play.

Why is accurate forecasting important?

Accurate forecasting and accurate accruals are vital to success within your business to ensure that you are aware of what the future is likely to hold so that you can appropriately allocate resources to assist in key areas. Accurate forecasting also helps you reduce unnecessary spending, avoid missing potential opportunities and means you can manage your cash flow better.

For many businesses, forecasting is not a focus and even for those that make a point to forecast their future, various challenges can limit the accuracy and benefit of these financial forecasts.

Challenges of forecasting rebates

Businesses face several challenges when developing forecasts and can lose a lot of precious time in the forecasting process. It becomes even more strenuous when there is a lack of common tools and inconsistent approaches. With this in mind, let’s dive in to the four common challenges of forecasting rebates.

1. Many in-house forecasting tools are too basic.
2. Renegotiating the best deals in the future.
3. The forecasting process is too manual.
4. Forecasts are not updated throughout the deal.

8 min read

Sometimes both parties come out of a negotiating a contract feeling like they have won but if you think you won and the other party (your supplier or your customer) feels they lost, then it’s not really a good situation to be in. If the customer feels they lost, then maybe they might have stuck with you because they need to in the short term, but in most situations, they could well be looking to take their business elsewhere in the future. On the other side if the supplier feels they were the lo...Continue reading

It’s essential to us at Enable to get the requirements for all of our projects right the first time. We achieve this by carrying out business analysis as a key step in our end-to-end process, ensuring that everything we build delivers maximum benefit to our clients.

Requirements workshops can be a great opportunity to work directly with clients to get to the bottom of their needs and build an understanding of their business objectives.

What is the goal of a requirements workshop?

Our primary goal in a requirements workshop is to understand the core of our client’s requirement and what they are hoping to achieve with their software project — this means developing in-depth knowledge of the client’s business, processes and challenges.

Some clients come to the workshop with lots of great ideas which is great, it’s encouraging to see that our clients are as passionate about their software as we are.

4 min read

Spring is kicking in and our team has a lot of exciting updates to share with you this month. Our latest updates were deployed to your UAT environment on 5th April 2019 and is now available for testing. Let's jump straight in!

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Supplier rebate agreements are often based on the volume of purchases of particular products. This means that in order to accurately calculate the rebate that should be accrued or collected, and to minimize the chance of disputes with suppliers it is crucial that your rebate calculations are based on accurate data.

When choosing which data to use for your supplier rebate calculation, you will likely be considering the three following options. Unsurprisingly, each of these choices have advantages and disadvantages to consider depending on your internal systems, business processes and priorities.

Let’s dive in and take a look at the pros and cons.

5 min read

Safety in numbers is the well-known hypothesis that, by being part of a large group, an individual can reduce their risks and is, therefore, more likely to succeed. In the same way, buying groups typically form to provide smaller independent companies greater buying power by consolidating their purchases. While this structure can be hugely beneficial, we’ve found that it usually adds complexity to the process of managing retrospective rebates.

Due to the number of members changing and volatility of small business, there can be a great variance in the purchase volume from time to time. This means that the buying group as a whole can often struggle to commit to consistent large purchasing volumes which reduces buying group negotiating power and will lead to suppliers offering lower discounts.

Rebates often enter the conversation as a mutually beneficial method, offering tiered discounts based on actual purchases. Whilst rebates are the best solution for this problem in the eyes of the buying group, supplier and buying group members, they create new challenges for all involved. This can lead to large amounts of time and energy — that could be better utilised elsewhere — being unnecessarily wasted.

Let’s dive in to the 5 rebate challenges that are faced by both buying groups and their members:

5 min read

Application programming interfaces — more commonly known as APIs — are essential building blocks for modern, high quality applications. With just a few simple clicks, you can do everything from order a takeaway, book a holiday, track a delivery, or even copy and paste a link from an email into a Microsoft Word document, and APIs work behind the scenes to make all these activities possible.

That is why Enable is pleased to announce a new DealTrack API that will provide a simple interface through clients can interact with all the data behind their deals, rebates, and much, much more.

For over a decade, our rebate management software has helped merchants, buying groups, wholesale distributors and retailers to drive mutually profitable growth with suppliers, whilst improving cash flow and reducing risk. That’s why we call it the supplier success platform.

4 min read