The Deal Economy - Page 5 - Enable

Whilst working with a number of organisations across industry sectors such as building materials, buying groups and wholesale and distribution, we have seen a large variety of very complex supplier rebates and trading agreements. These very often involve incredibly complicated performance-based calculations with seemingly endless permutations, and on top of that rebate agreements are subject to periodic review and change. In the building materials sector for example, there are further complicati...Continue reading

If you’re a builders merchant 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 building materials suppliers 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 rebat...Continue reading

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. Some ERP systems have functionality for recording rebate agreements, but often lack the granular level of functionality needed to carry out detailed matching of actual purchase...Continue reading

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....Continue reading

Firstly, if you’re reading this blog you will most likely to be familiar with what an ERP system (enterprise resource planning) is, but as a reminder it is a type of software that manages and integrates a company’s financials, supply chain, operations, reporting, manufacturing, and human resource activities into one system. Examples of ERP systems include NetSuite, Oracle, SAP, SAGE plus many more. Many ERP systems already have a way of recording contract information and a vendor rebate module...Continue reading

Contracts are core to any business activities, regardless of size, industry, and region. They set out the prices, service levels, terms and supplier relationship and ensure that your company is regularly supplied with their direct and indirect supplies. A study by the Institute for Supply Management uncovered that between 60-80% of all business-to-business transactions are governed by some form of written agreement, with a typical Fortune 1000 company maintaining 20,000 to 40,000 active contract...Continue reading

As experts in rebate management, we have come across (and help to fix) many problems with rebate management spanning commercial, financial and operational processes. In this article we focus on the financial side where most issues revolve around accuracy, predictability and auditability. These are usually among the key drivers of our customers’ business cases in defining their requirements and selecting DealTrack to manage their rebates. In our experience, when our customers get these financia...Continue reading

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...Continue reading

In our experience, many businesses that receive rebate revenue from suppliers, don't have the means to be able to check that it is correct. They are completely reliant on suppliers to accurately calculate and make the payments. Because they tend to record rebate agreements outside of their financial system, these businesses are unable to match the cash received against amounts owed from their rebate deals, and for that reason they don’t set up a debtor in the same way that customers are treated....Continue reading

This building materials supplier was struggling to reconcile rebate information in their unwieldy spreadsheet-based system. They also had an issue around extracting detailed and summary data across all branches and categories prior to the negotiation. They felt that they needed to gain control over rebate income and at the same time find a solution that would help them to improve their supplier negotiations. With insufficient accurate, consolidated information at their fingertips, the procuremen...Continue reading

This business had used a bespoke system to manage rebate earnings for some time, but rebates were calculated at a very high level and were based on data provided by suppliers rather than their own data. They reviewed the situation and estimated that by making calculations at a more granular level of detail, they could significantly increase the level of rebate claims within the existing deal structures. They moved to Microsoft Dynamics AX for their core financial system, but it was clear from th...Continue reading

This building supplies company has over 50 branches and is growing. They recognised that having smooth business processes would be an essential foundation for their growth plans, and whilst most parts of the business had been systemised, the area of rebate management remained an anomaly. They were using spreadsheets because their core ERP system (Kerridge) did not support their requirements. They approached Enable to discuss the suitability of DealTrack to their needs and were keen to discover...Continue reading

With over a thousand branches and hundreds of thousands of stock items, this business had a huge issue with managing rebates. Everything was being managed on spreadsheets, and they experienced many of the usual issues such as version control and human error. They commissioned a firm of consultants to review their options and invited several software companies to tender for a solution. Their aim was to find a solution that automated as much of the rebate reconciliation process as possible and the...Continue reading

This business manages over 1m stocked items, the majority of which have some kind of associated rebate deal. Within the first 12 months of operation they recognised a 200% return on their investment in DealTrack software. They had previously built a rebates module as part of their bespoke financial system. However, whilst this had been built to specification, over time it lacked the flexibility to manage every type of deal. As a result, spreadsheets were used to control many elements and inform...Continue reading

Buying groups, as the name suggests, are formed to give buying power to smaller independent companies through purchase consolidation. Whilst buying groups don’t typically have control over the systems implemented by members, they do need information from members in order to negotiate the best possible deals on their behalf. It has long been recognised that buying groups can have difficulties in committing to purchase volumes with any degree of certainty. That impacts both the buying group’s abi...Continue reading