The agreements in the buyer's drawer
Most of your big suppliers pay something back. One gives a retrospective rebate once you pass a tier of annual purchases. Another pays per case sold through to a certain type of customer. A third funds a promotion but only if you send proof of the sell-out within sixty days. Each agreement is a PDF or an email, with its own dates and its own list of qualifying product codes.
In practice, the buyer keeps a spreadsheet for the two biggest ones and hopes the others are small. At year end the finance person asks what is due, and the answer depends on a day of pulling reports.
Why rebates are so easy to lose
Rebate money is earned from data you already hold (purchase orders, goods received, sales invoices by customer), but the rules for each agreement sit outside your systems. Nothing joins the two. So claims depend on someone reading the agreement, pulling the right report and doing the sums, often after the claim window has closed.
| Rebate type | Where it usually goes wrong |
|---|---|
| Volume tier on purchases | Nobody notices you are just short of the next tier |
| Sell-through per unit | Sales by end customer type are not reported in the right form |
| Promotional funding | Proof of sale not sent within the claim window |
| Growth rebate | Last year's baseline worked out differently each time |
| Listing or range support | Agreed verbally, never recorded |
What goes unclaimed
Money the supplier had budgeted to pay you stays with them. Buying decisions are made without knowing that another pallet would lift the whole year into a better tier. And at month end your margin looks worse than it really is, because the rebate that belongs against those sales is not accrued. Finance and purchasing argue about numbers that neither can prove.
There is a relationship cost as well. A supplier who receives a late claim with no supporting data will ask for it, and the back and forth can run for months. A claim that arrives on time, with the invoices and quantities laid out the way they asked, tends to be paid without fuss.
The rebate tracker we build
- Each agreement is entered once as rules: supplier, period, qualifying product codes or groups, tiers or per unit rates, customer types included, and the claim deadline.
- Purchase and sales data flows in from your stock and accounts system daily, through its API, database or a scheduled export.
- The tracker calculates what has been earned so far against each agreement, and how far you are from the next tier.
- Buyers see a simple view when they place orders: 'this supplier: 82 cases to the next tier, period ends in six weeks'.
- At the end of each period, the tool prepares the claim with the line-level data behind it, in the format the supplier asks for, for someone to check and send.
- Claim status is tracked until the credit note or payment arrives and is matched.
We do not tell you what to agree with suppliers or how to account for rebates. Your finance team or accountant sets how accruals are handled; the tracker supplies the figures.
How purchasing changes
Rebate agreements stop being paper in a drawer. Buyers can see which deals are on track before the period ends, finance gets a monthly figure to accrue with the working behind it, and claims go out on time with evidence the supplier can check. When a supplier disputes a claim, the line-level data is already there.
Could this be you?
- You have rebate agreements but no single list of them.
- Claims are prepared once a year, in a hurry.
- You have missed a claim deadline.
- Buyers do not know how close they are to a tier.
- Month end margin is adjusted later for rebates nobody could estimate.