The Deal Economy - Page 8 - Enable

Businesses managing complex trading agreements face several hurdles that are difficult to overcome entirely when using manual processes and spreadsheets. Lack of transparency, inaccuracy and limited control of rebate accounting processes is common and the ramifications of these can have a damaging effect on profit, compliance, cash flow and business growth. For example, an accounting mistake that supermarket retailer Tesco made meant a £129m fine to avoid prosecution by the FCA for overstating i...Continue reading

In our online guide “IFRS 15 — 7 steps to prepare for January 2018” one of our suggestions is to review every deal in every contract and make it SMART. We think that whilst it’s a good idea as part of financial compliance, SMART deals are good for anyone who manages a contract with complex rebate deals, so we thought we would share it with you. A SMART deal is like a SMART objective in project management terms, namely: Specific Be VERY specific. If a deal refers to “across all product lines”, i...Continue reading

Missing out on claiming manufacturer’s rebates is like negotiating a higher price with your suppliers. It simply shouldn’t happen! That's why we created a rebate management system chosen by several building merchants, wholesale distributors and buying groups. There are many examples in the building materials industry where, instead of agreeing an up-front discount, discounts are given in the form of rebates based on actual volumes purchased. For the supplier, this fosters brand loyalty and mean...Continue reading

IFRS 15 ‘Revenue from Contracts with Customers’ comes into force on 1st January 2018. The new financial reporting standards (IFRS 15) have a particular impact for businesses who regularly have contracts that contain “elements of variable consideration”. IFRS 15:51 provides us with examples of “variable consideration” which include rebates, incentives, refunds, performance bonuses, credits, price concessions, penalties or other similar items — items that impact the real net-net price and ultima...Continue reading

It isn’t unusual to find that rebate agreements cannot be fully represented within ERP systems and spreadsheets, resulting in disparate sources of information being stored within ERP systems, spreadsheets and even people’s heads! This management headache is multiplied when you consider these 3 major risks: lack of control over profitability, with poor understanding of true margin at point of sale, and roughly estimated true product costs feeding into profit calculations missed revenue opportun...Continue reading

Most businesses have a choice of 4 types of system to manage their trading agreements, but that doesn’t mean each one is the right fit for every business. We explore all options below. 1 — Your core ERP system Basic ERP systems do not cope with vendor rebates very well at all. Some ERP systems do have bolt-on vendor rebate modules. They tend to provide some flexibility but in a very complex environment the standard module is often not up to the job and incapable of modelling all the product / pr...Continue reading

What is a rebate? And how do they work? Rebates were “invented” as a way of driving sales growth without simply reducing the contract price. By agreeing these retrospective financial incentives based on actual sales, both the supplier and the distributor are working together to drive market share and growth.Rebates often act as either a reward for loyalty or as an incentive for increasing trade with a specific trading partner because the benefits of a rebate agreement tend to improve as trade w...Continue reading

If you’re responsible for procurement in a buying group, wholesale distributor, multi-site or large business (such as building materials, HVAC, plumbing and electrical supplies businesses or buying groups of all types) then it’s likely you have a need for a contract management system that can accurately deal with supplier rebates. Rebates were originally designed to aid both the manufacturer and the distributor to grow product sales without resorting to a price war. By maintaining a set price th...Continue reading

Complex ERP and supply chain systems such as SAP are built to cover a broad range of requirements for organisations in a lot of different sectors. If you have a need for niche, deeper industry specific functionality such as complex vendor rebate management, then trying to force your organisation’s needs and processes to fit with general ERP functionality limits your ability to maximise value from your vendor rebates.The best of breed vs ERP debate has raged ever since ERP packages became availab...Continue reading

Our rebate management system: DealTrack is aimed at those businesses for whom a significant portion of their margin results from vendor rebates, retrospective discounts, tiered discounts and the like. Businesses in the building materials, wholesale distribution and those who are part of buying groups frequently trade on these deal types. Since we first released DealTrack we have monitored the return on investment that has been enjoyed by users of this rebate management system and I wanted to sha...Continue reading

Builders merchants, building materials companies and building trade suppliers are working in a competitive industry in which profitability is heavily reliant on procurement to strike the right deals. We’ve recently been working with Richard Piekar, a global procurement expert, and wanted to share with you his experience of developing procurement excellence at CRH plc. CRH is a leading global building materials group employing over 89,000 people at around 3,900 locations worldwide. Richard’s jour...Continue reading

Multiple vendor rebates which are very often complex in nature can have a significant impact on the effectiveness of financial and procurement teams, profit margins and company performance. Dealtrack's rebate accounting experts held a webinar to discuss ways to 'Manage complex vendor rebates deals and drive margin'. In this webinar we hear from Richard Piekar — a seasoned global procurement professional who has spent many years working for enterprises in the Building Materials sector. Rebates...Continue reading

It's all too easy for revenues to simply leak away if rebates are not managed and accounted for correctly. Several companies have made the headlines in recent years and IFRS 15 looks set to put rebate accounting firmly in the spotlight. The necessity for businesses to have an effective rebate management system in place to deal with complex trading agreements has become more apparent. We’ve seen that complex trading agreements such as supplier rebates often involve incredibly complicated perform...Continue reading

The challenge for many companies who manage rebates not only with hundreds of suppliers but also multiple divisions of single suppliers is being able to see the complete picture when negotiating vendor rebates. So let’s describe a vendor rebate scenario: A leading building materials distributor deals with a large group company, which has a flooring division, a concrete products division, an aggregates division, etc. With each division there could be several rebate deals, different terms and reba...Continue reading

It's a complex task managing multiple vendor rebate deals across multiple vendors, multiple product lines, and in some cases multiple units of measure. 2 for 1, multi-pack discounts, retrospective discounts, limited lifetime promotions, not to mention awards points and prizes make rebate accounting a very complex job. By way of illustration, we have worked on one rebate example where there were 300 deals written into 1 vendor contract. Without the right tools and information rebate accountant...Continue reading