Approved in March, invoiced at list in May
Your account manager negotiated a special price with the vendor for a large competitive deal. The approval came back through the distributor as an email with a bid number, a list of products, quantities, a price and an expiry date. The customer's order arrived two months later. The order went to the distributor without the bid number, or with a slightly different product code, and the invoice came back at the standard price.
Now someone has to chase a credit, find the approval email, prove the bid was valid, and hope it had not expired in the meantime.
Why approved bids get lost
Special bid, special pricing or deal-specific discount requests go through vendor and distributor processes that live mainly in email and portals. The approval is a document with its own rules: which products, how many, which end customer, until when. None of that is naturally attached to the quote in your CRM, and none of it is checked when the order is placed.
Bids also change. Customers change quantities, swap a product for a newer version or split the order in two. Each change may fall outside what was approved.
| Bid detail | What goes wrong |
|---|---|
| Bid number | Left off the distributor order |
| Approved products | Order uses a different code or version |
| Approved quantity | Customer orders more or splits the order |
| End customer | Order placed under a different entity name |
| Expiry date | Order arrives after it has passed |
What a lost bid costs
The difference between a special price and the standard price on a large deal can be most of the margin, or more. If the credit cannot be recovered, it comes out of your profit. If the customer was quoted on the special price, you cannot pass it on. Chasing credits also takes days of back and forth with the distributor.
Expired bids caught late are the worst case: by then the customer has a PO and the vendor may not extend.
The bid register we build
- Approval capture: bid approval emails from the vendor or distributor are read from a shared inbox, and the bid number, products, quantities, prices, end customer and expiry are extracted, with a person confirming the details.
- Link to the deal: each bid is linked to its CRM opportunity and quote, and the quote lines are priced from the bid rather than from standard cost.
- Expiry alerts: bids approaching expiry on open deals alert the account manager in time to request an extension.
- Order check: when the order is created, the bid number is added automatically, and the order lines are checked against the approved products, quantities and end customer, with any difference stopping the order for review.
- Invoice check: the distributor invoice is compared line by line with the bid price, and any line charged at a different price creates a credit request with the approval attached.
- Credit tracking: open credit requests are tracked until the credit note arrives and is matched.
How bid deals run afterwards
Account managers see the bid on the opportunity with its expiry. Orders carry the bid number every time, and the ones that no longer match the approval are caught before they are placed, while there is still time to ask the vendor for an amendment. When a distributor invoice is wrong, the credit request is raised the day it arrives, with the evidence attached.
Has a special bid slipped through before?
- Distributor invoices have come back at standard price on a bid deal.
- Bid approvals live in individual email inboxes.
- Nobody checks order lines against what the bid approved.
- A bid has expired before the customer's order arrived.
- Credits for pricing errors take weeks to chase.