The remittance never matches the invoice
The payment lands, and it is short. The remittance advice lists a dozen lines with codes and references: a promotional funding claim, a price variance, a short delivery, a damaged goods credit, a logistics charge. Some are fair. Some you have never heard of. Some are for a promotion you agreed at a different rate.
Credit control has to open the remittance, find the invoices, find the promotion paperwork, find the proof of delivery and decide what to do. With several customers and weekly payments, the unresolved lines pile up in a spreadsheet that only one person understands.
Why deductions go unchecked
The information needed to check a deduction lives in four places: accounts, the sales team's promotion agreements, the transport office's delivery records, and the customer's own portal. Nobody has time to pull those together for each line, so small deductions are written off and larger ones are chased late, after the customer's dispute window has closed.
- Remittances arrive as PDFs or portal downloads in each customer's own layout.
- Promotion terms are agreed by sales and kept in email or a deal sheet.
- Proofs of delivery sit with the haulier or on paper in the transport office.
- Customers set time limits for disputing a deduction.
What unchecked deductions cost
Money, directly: deductions that should not have been taken are simply lost if they are never queried. Indirectly, a large unmatched balance makes the sales ledger hard to trust, month-end takes longer, and sales cannot see the true net price of a promotion because the funding claims land weeks later against different invoices.
The deductions tracker we build
- Remittances are collected from email or downloaded from customer portals where access allows, and each line is read, including PDFs, using document extraction.
- Each deduction is classified by type from the customer's own codes, using a mapping your credit control team can edit.
- The tracker matches each line to the invoice in Sage, Xero or your ERP, to the promotion agreement held against the customer, and to the delivery record for that order.
- Where the deduction agrees with the evidence, it is marked as accepted and posted. Where it does not, the difference is shown and the line is queued for a person.
- Each queued line shows the dispute deadline for that customer, so the oldest and most valuable are handled first.
- Disputes are raised with the evidence attached, and the outcome is recorded against the line.
| Deduction type | Checked against |
|---|---|
| Promotional funding | Agreed promotion terms and dates |
| Price variance | Customer price list on the order date |
| Short delivery | Signed proof of delivery |
| Damages or rejections | Delivery notes and returns records |
| Charges and fees | Trading terms with that customer |
What credit control gets
A list of deductions with the evidence beside each one, sorted by what matters most. Fair deductions are cleared in bulk, and the questionable ones are raised while there is still time to do so. Sales can see what each promotion actually cost once the claims came in, which changes the next negotiation.
It also stops the ledger drifting. Month-end starts with the remittances already matched instead of a pile of part-paid invoices.
Over a few months the tracker shows patterns too: a depot that reports short deliveries more than the others, a charge that keeps appearing without being in your trading terms, a promotion claimed twice. Those are conversations to have with the customer's buyer, and they go better with the list in front of you.
Signs you are losing money here
- Remittances regularly pay less than the invoices and nobody knows why.
- Small deductions are written off because checking them takes too long.
- Promotion terms live in sales emails, not with credit control.
- Deductions are disputed after the customer's deadline has passed.
- The sales ledger has old part-paid invoices that nobody can explain.