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.
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.
At Enable, we benefit from, and contribute to, a number of open source projects. We believe it’s important to give back to the open source community where we can, which we do by contributing to the projects that we use daily. By raising bug reports, fixes and new features, we help make those projects even better. We also publish lots of our own code as open source libraries on GitHub.
We’ve found that participating in open source is a great way to learn. At Enable, our developers are highly-educated, highly-skilled and are driven to continue to grow their skills. By contributing to open source, our developers can explore how different projects are structured, how they operate and what tools and patterns they are using. All of the technical and leadership skills learnt by contributing to open source can be fed back into our own projects, helping us create even more delightful applications for our clients.
In this article, we’ll take a look at a couple of open source libraries we’ve developed at Enable and how they’ve made our switch to hosting applications using Microsoft Azure easier.
Our August DealTrack update is now available within your UAT (user acceptance testing) environment. This provides the perfect opportunity to test newly introduced features, solution improvements and performance enhancements.
On Saturday 21st July 2018, Enable employees and their partners celebrated another year of success and innovation at Stratford-upon-Avon Boat Club for our second annual Summer Party!
Summer parties have become increasingly popular for companies over the years, with the huge appeal giving employees the opportunity to bond and help people from other departments get to know each other a lot better. These types of get-togethers are also an excellent opportunity to give our exceptionally loyal and motivated employees recognition for the hard work that they are doing and rewarding them for it. Staff retention is something that Enable prides itself on as we expect to grow to over 100 employees by 2020.
Founded in 2000, by entrepreneurs Denys Shortt OBE and Andrew Butt, Enable are the outsourced partner of choice for clients who wish to invest in continuous improvement through iterative development of their software products and business systems.
From our humble beginnings in a stable block, our team has grown to 75 people, half of whom are in technical software development roles. Our ambition is to double in size by 2020.
Our mission is to provide a vibrant and diverse working environment where everything we do, how we do it, and why we do it is rooted in two concepts: freedom and focus. Our employees have the freedom to work creatively, while our team structure and project processes allow them to focus entirely on solving any given challenge.
We have made our home in Stratford-upon-Avon at the heart of Warwickshire, which was recently voted the 10th best place to live in the UK in an Office for National Statistics personal wellbeing survey. Close to the M40, Stratford-upon-Avon offers a direct rail line to Birmingham that runs every hour, making it an ideal location for anyone wishing to regularly commute from the city centre.
Our June DealTrack update is now available within your UAT (user acceptance testing) environment. This provides the perfect opportunity to test newly introduced features, solution improvements and performance enhancements.
Over the past 17 years, Enable has forged strong relationships with some of the finest universities, bringing in the brightest students that they have to offer — with 79% of our analysts and developers graduating from one of the top 25 featured in the Times 2018 UK rankings! We regularly hold recruitment events and have formed close ties to the University of Warwick and the University of Birmingham. This gives us the opportunity to engage and network with students, whist giving them a real insight into our company.
We particularly focus our recruitment on high achievers in numerate subjects, with 66% of our employees holding an undergraduate degree in either Maths or Science, and 41% attaining a Masters or PhD in their chosen field of study. This provides us with exceptional employees who not only possess outstanding technical skills, but also the ability to translate that knowledge into highly effective business solutions.
Geoff graduated from the University of Warwick in 2014 with an MEng in Computer Science before joining Enable as a Business Analyst. Geoff began his career at Enable working alongside our existing experienced analysts to uncover, discuss and challenge our clients’ requirements, and then document those requirements in the form of a comprehensive specification. Geoff offers his thoughts on his experience as a Business Analyst at Enable so far.
Most ERP systems do not cope with complex vendor rebates very well. Some do have bolt-on vendor rebate modules, but we have found that in a very complex trading environment the standard module is incapable of modelling all the product / price / branch / margin combinations that might be required. When dealing with complex trading agreements involving rebates most ERP systems fail to:
The decision to choose a contract management system is often driven by a need to model complex purchasing agreements that cannot be met using spreadsheets or existing ERP systems. The first decision to make is about the type of contract management system that you need. Do you operate in an environment where complex discounts and rebates are prevalent? If the answer is “yes” then you may actually need a Rebate Management System.
As experts in rebate management, we have come across (and fixed) many problems with rebate management processes. Here are the 7 most common things that businesses need to fix in order to improve profitability and growth. 1. Problems capturing rebate agreements in core business systems Companies tend to look for a specialist solution to rebate management when they reach a point where their core business systems are proven to be inadequate. We have seen several scenarios:
Due to the intricacies of most supplier trade agreements, rebate accounting is a notoriously complex operation. Many organisations still manage their rebates with spreadsheets or rely on their suppliers to make the calculations, despite this leaving them at high risk of errors and omissions that could lack audit compliance and lead to significant revenue loss. To improve upon your current rebate management system, it’s necessary to take full control of the rebate process and the difficulties tha...
Our mission is to provide “freedom to focus” and that applies as much to our own staff as to our customers. For our customers, our software provides the means for them to focus on what really matters in their business. In the case of DealTrack, we enable our customers to focus on supplier relationships and maximising deals, whilst the system takes care of tracking and accounting for rebates. For our employees, our structure is such that our developers are completely and utterly focused on develo...
On Friday 4th May 2018, Enable’s Client Services team headed out for food and drinks in Stratford-upon-Avon to celebrate the department’s 1st year anniversary!
Founded in 2000, by entrepreneurs Denys Shortt OBE and Andrew Butt, Enable builds and supports business software and mobile applications using Microsoft technology, for some of the UK’s largest companies. As Enable continues to expand at a significant rate, a dedicated Client Services team was established in May 2017. The introduction of this team provides our clients with a reliable resource to assist with both support requests and the delivery of projects.
The Client Services team are on hand to provide our clients with an ongoing support service, covering general questions, diagnosing problems, fixing bugs and discussing possible changes to existing software systems. Rather than passing responsibility to third-party providers, the team takes direct ownership in resolving issues. This leaves our clients safe in the knowledge that requests will be resolved efficiently and promptly.
Enable has formed the Building Materials Industry Advisory Group to inform our development team as we continue to create software products to solve industry-wide challenges that are not easily addressed by existing IT solutions. The early versions of Enable’s flagship software product, DealTrack, primarily focused on allowing companies to manage supplier rebates. The software is aimed at those companies in which rebate income makes up a significant proportion of profit, and it provides functiona...