Automated and Streamlined Supplier Processing for Retailer Deductions

Retailer  deductions pose challenges that any supplier and distributor to a large retailer will know well. Whether you call them chargebacks, short-pay, or deductions, these claims put significant dents in suppliers’ profit margins, and leave them with the headache of disputing the deductions with the retailers who originally issued them.

Deductions processing is complex, lengthy, and time-consuming for all parties involved, but especially for suppliers. This recovery process is usually conducted in one of these common methods:

• The supplier burdens their credit and collections team with overtime work in order to cover hundreds or thousands of retailer deductions. Some suppliers also hire additional staff and temporary workers just to stay current on their deductions and effectively manage their customer accounts.
  
  
• The same staff is also burdened with sending data to retailer portals in specific configurations, which can become confusing and burdensome when handling thousands of claims and dozens of different retailer requirements. This extra expense and burden can further chip away at suppliers’ budgets and compound the financial pressure exerted by vast sums of accumulated deductions.
  
  
• The supplier outsources their dispute and supplier recovery process to third-party organizations that dispute and manage deductions manually. This is another costly option that does nothing to resolve the issue of retailer deductions and prevent them from occurring in the future.
  
  
• Turning to outdated legacy software solutions like bulky ERP modules and complete order to cash systems in order to stay on top of deductions and win back a portion of their lost profits.

These legacy systems require significant budgets, training, and configuration time, not to mention the ongoing involvement of your IT team. Bear in mind that these tools don’t upload claim packages to retailer portals automatically, which still leaves manual labor for your team to handle.

The Importance of Deductions Processing

Retailers charge their suppliers for a vast array of perceived transgressions and discrepancies, including damaged or missing shipments, mismatched documentation, and even shipping practices that don’t meet their exacting standards.

Deductions can also be issued for transportation and packing problems, late or early shipments, and goods not received, among many other listed issues. Compliance issues, shortages, and pricing claims can all leave you with slim profits at the end of the day, and this is especially true if you don’t have an effective cost recovery process in place.

Most retailers’ deductions are  automated by powerful systems and these charges can be applied at astounding speeds and volumes. However, it’s important to note that not all of these deductions are valid, as the retailer's own faulty inventory and A/P systems can generate invalid deductions pushing the responsibility on the supplier to prove otherwise. Regardless of the size of your business, deductions have major impacts on your financial viability and profitability.

Using a robotic process automation (RPA) based supplier recovery process will enable you to recover the revenues you have lost to invalid deductions without allocating more staff to meet the growing challenge.

Streamlining the Deductions Process with iNymbus

You could compare the deduction recovery process to being on a sinking ship with a hole in its bow. There are a dozen different ways to repair the hole, but time is of the essence and most of those solutions would require time and effort that you simply cannot expend. RPA solutions like iNymbus enable you to address current influxes of deductions using a system that can be implemented rapidly – in just 4 to 6 weeks – with minimal involvement from your human team.

Our automated deduction processing bots automatically dispute each and every retailer claim that is issued to your business, even if you received them many months or years ago. As long as the appropriate documentation can be provided and the issuing retailer accepts the dispute claim, our bots can aid your recovery process by submitting complete disputes for each individual claim you are issued.

The Power of iNymbus’ Recovery Process Technology

Streamlining deductions processing across all of our customers’ accounts is a key part of our success. With iNymbus, each and every task related to your deductions resolution and recovery process is consistently automated using robotic technologies. Our RPA bots download and match supporting documentation (BOL, POD, order info), validate claims, create complete dispute claim packages, and upload them automatically to the appropriate retailer portals without intervention. This process could take 30 minutes per claim when completed manually, but our system can achieve even more accurate and efficient results in seconds.

DeductionsXchange begins its work by centralizing and matching order and deduction documentation through the iNymbus dashboard. This data can be directly accessed and exported for analysis and reporting procedures as well.

Next, our technology analyzes, validates, and auto-resolves claims on an individual basis. Any invalid claims will have disputes issued in the Vendor Central portal instantly, saving your team the challenge of doing it manually. Our bots capture and dispute 100% of the deductions issued to your business, which ensures that you can win back as many of your financial losses as possible through the recovery process.

Here is a prime example of what our software can help your organization to achieve. One new iNymbus customer was 11 months behind on her claims management, which resulted in a backlog worth more than $2.8 million. Under normal circumstances, becoming current on this huge backlog would have required the client to hire a professional analyst to spend hundreds of hours sifting through documents. Once our RPA bots had been implemented, this same client was able to recuperate over $2.3 million in losses in less than 3 weeks!

The Bottom Line

The supplier recovery process can be a complicated and tedious one filled with inefficiencies and miscommunications between suppliers and retailers. 

iNymbus' technologies streamline dispute processes across all of your customer accounts and their respective portals to ensure seamless, accurate dispute resolution processes at all times. Contact us today to learn how we can save you up to 80% of the costs of processing each claim you are issued with our premier solutions.