

By
Andrew Butt
August 17, 2022
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 means that margins are given away only in return for true purchase volume. For the buyer this gives the potential to drive up margins — but only if their sales forecasts can be achieved.Having agreed to a contract that includes a rebate for volume purchases, the buyer (eg the builders merchant) has a number of things to keep track of, including:
We can see just from the examples above, that there are at least three different parties within the builders merchant who need to work together in order that the company profits from the agreements they have in place:
Added to that, is a layer of complexity in terms of the variety of rebate agreements that can be in place at any one time.
But the ability to replicate all of those different types of agreement within your contract management system or the vendor rebate module of your ERP system may in fact be limited. As a result, many building materials businesses we have spoken to resort to monitoring sales and rebates in spreadsheets. In a multi-channel, multi-site business collating and acting on information in spreadsheets is clearly a huge challenge, open to error and reconciliation problems.
Builders’ merchants Wolseley and Grafton found their existing systems let them down. Having missed opportunities to achieve better margins, and grappled with the administrative burden involved in their old processes, both companies decided to look for an alternative.They (along with several other well known names) chose our Rebate Management System.This software manages contracts, automates processes and handles all the complexities involved in tiered discounts and retrospective trade agreements.Enable rebate management software meets the needs of builder’s merchants where other systems can fall short:
Solving rebate accounting problems by simply getting control of margins and profitability (though for many, that in itself is a big leap forwards) isn’t actually the end goal. Once users have implemented Enable and reaped those rewards, the next exciting phase starts.Enable’s carefully thought-out workflow, alerts and reporting provides users with the information needed for smarter trading: selling in a way that maximises margin.Then, to come full circle — back to the point of having rebates in the first place — Enable helps businesses create mutually beneficial trading agreements, enabling both parties to grow market share.