Rebate management blog - Page 24 - Enable

The complexities involved in managing complex trade agreements and rebate accounting and retrospective discount payments are often difficult to model in manual systems such as spreadsheets and basic accounting software or rely on their suppliers to make the calculations. Organisations opting to calculate, forecast and accrue rebate income in this way leave themselves at risk of inaccuracies, missed opportunities and supplier disputes. To improve upon your current rebate management system, it&rsq...Continue reading

Enable is committed to ensuring our software is constantly being updated and improved. To achieve this, we release a new Enable update every six weeks.

November’s update introduces a new look to Enable, bringing a brighter theme to the user interface. There is also a brand new trading partner reconciliation report available for configuration to offer even more detailed reporting.

These updates are already available to test in our UAT environment. Deployment to the live environment will take place on December 11, 2019.

A volume discount is a change to the cost of a product based on the quantity of that product traded with your trading partner. Typically, volume discounts are paid retrospectively so sit under the wider banner of rebate, although sometimes these volume discounts can be up front.

This potential retrospectivity often depends on whether different discounts apply to incremental tiers of volumes traded with a specific trading partner throughout the course of the year, meaning that you are unsure of the value of the discount until the year end.

Volume discounts are often used by suppliers to incentivize greater purchase volumes and are available due to the advantages brought about by economies of scale. This has the side effect of increasing the suppliers market share and presence in the marketplace because increasing quantities of their products are being traded.

8 min read

Growth in many businesses can essentially be boiled down to smart purchasing and profitable selling. The building materials industry is a prime example of this.

Of course, superficially, purchasing smart and selling profitably should be relatively easy. However, the way deals are agreed between suppliers and merchants in the building materials industry make this more exponentially more difficult!

The status quo

What we’ve seen in the building materials industry

Manufacturers in the building materials industry regularly use rebates as a mechanism of maintaining their stated price, but incentivizing trading partners to purchase in higher volumes in order to get a retrospective discount.

10 min read

In a slow-growth market, many building and construction distributors are seeking new paths to profit. A more strategic approach to supplier trading agreements can help. Glance at the modest growth projections for the U.S. building and construction industry, and you could be forgiven for thinking building and construction distributors might struggle to achieve stellar performance. But as always, the headline figures don’t tell the whole story. Many building and construction distributors ar...Continue reading

Will your rebate accounting come back to haunt you? Settle down around our campfire, and we’ll share some cautionary tales… It’s a chilly October evening. You’re sitting alone in your kitchen, reading your favorite industry blog. Then, with a startling suddenness, your phone begins to ring. You answer and a stranger’s voice says your name. Then, they tell you where they’re calling from. Your blood runs cold. It’s not a masked killer, hiding inside your...Continue reading

Well-managed customer rebate programs are extremely valuable. They can help your business win the loyalty of distributors and buying groups, while driving mutual, strategic growth. Whether you’re new to the world of B2B customer rebates, or you’re an old hand looking to maximize the value of multiple customer rebate programs&emdash;you’re in the right place. Use the links below to leap to the topic you’re most interested in. What are B2B customer rebates? Why are these...Continue reading

Automated approval workflow: reducing risk and improving your company’s audit trails

Regardless of the industry that you work in, having a consistent, secure and auditable workflow is not just a necessary evil, it’s essential for your business’s success. Workflow processes are generally repetitive or routine tasks, making them frequent targets for admin errors such as, sending the agreement to the wrong person or even forgetting to get the agreement signed off at all!

This is where automation comes in. By automating these workflow processes, you can not only help to reduce the risks that may occur, but also significantly improve your company’s compliance, audit trail and productivity.

6 min read