The Surprising [And Unfortunate] Truth About Spreadsheets

You depend on incentive programs and special pricing agreements to help drive revenue, as well as improve the performance of products and channel partners.

However, the administrative ‘status-quo’ of these programs pose significant financial challenges to channel and finance teams.

Relying on different technologies, inputs and processes to manage backend rebates all but assures miscalculations—causing thousands (and potentially millions) of dollars to be erroneously credited. 

Manual management of enormous quantities of channel data (with Excel spreadsheet) puts manufacturers in an extremely vulnerable position; it extends far and wide within the infrastructure of an organization--hurting productivity and the reconciliation of information that impact periodic forecasting, allocation of resources, budgeting, and overhead/operational expenses.

Full-time employee’s sit in front of spreadsheets trying to manage disparate partner data feeds, determine approvals, and authorize payments for hundreds or even thousands of pricing programs yearly--with many overlapping (or duplicating) each other.

This level of adoption simply falls short, unable to sufficiently reign in processing costs while increasing issues with budgeting, resource allocation, and cash flow.

As with all manual processes, there are inevitable break downs and/or missing elements in critical areas that directly impact the financial status of your company, for example:

• Accuracy and Consistency — resulting in the erroneous validation of claims, leading to overpayments/duplicate payments
• Valid Audit Trail — electronic process storage and retrieval of data
• Reporting — net revenue and sales reports (ROI) with quantifiable metrics

Approaches that heavily rely on spreadsheets, use manual review processes, or attempt to stretch the functionality of related systems are both labor-intensive and completely inadequate when it comes to managing the high volumes of incentive claims.

As a result, businesses are left with many uncertainties regarding the large volume of dollars surrounding their trade agreements and promotions, such as:

-Who gets paid what?

-Are partners receiving the correct rebate credits?

-Do partners receive timely credits, or are credits being received at all?

-Are there rebates overlapping?

-What source data should be used to analyze claims?

-Which sales and marketing programs are successful? 

Ultimately, the indirect sales funnel is far too complex to handle backend rebates without a robust, fully responsive price management system in place. Without the technical capacity to accurately approve and validate partner claims, while effortlessly refer back to each transaction, understanding the true financial status of your business—as well as stating your liability with channel partners—is flawed.

Here are some of the areas manufacturers leave themselves most vulnerable in without an automated partner claims management process:

1. Claim overpayments — Keeping track of partner incentive programs and submitted claims manually all but guarantees inaccurate accounts payable. Without an adequate support system in place, channel teams quickly become overwhelmed trying to keep up processing the never-ending stream of claims for payments requiring validation.
2. Unreliable Reporting — Manual data collection greatly increases erroneous calculations of net revenue; furthermore, inability to track each transaction of current and historical POS data deteriorates demand forecasting and overall business productivity. All it takes is one small, incorrect keystroke or mental lapse, and the entire claims document is defective. 
3. Inaccurate Program Reconciliation — Without a price management system that auto-matches volume commitment thresholds or incentive rebate requirements, you have little to no validation into best performing partners, most profitable programs or accuracy into estimations of monthly/annually payments to partners.
4.  Operational inefficiency — Manual processing of claim-form data means your team is allocating an unnecessary amount of resources and overhead into claim management. With price management automation, your workforce can allocate their labor into other (more important) revenue generating activities. However, auditing backend rebates with traditional methods puts an unneeded strain on labor workload. Overworked channel teams do not properly validate claims, instead, they validate pricing discounts without realizing they’re significantly overpaying; inadequate tools for managing complex, high-volume sales channels also lead to delays in processing—resulting in frustrated, unsatisfied partners.
5. Unnecessary waste of financial resources – Overtime, chronic overpayments takes a significant toll on internal revenue. This means you are taking away financial resources from areas of your business that might need them most—a negligent and completely unwarranted business flaw.
6. Risk of Partners to ‘Game the System’ – Sooner than later, your channel partners will catch on to the fact that you don’t have a competent system in place towards auditing claims. Your inability to accurately calculate claims against special pricing parameters means partners can take advantage of the ‘grey areas’ of your process, knowing that you don’t have the resources/technical capacity to identify invalid discounts.

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Exciting news for channel businesses using Excel spreadsheets to manage partner rebate claims:

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