Claims and Deductions - The Supermarket Sweep of Finance

In the fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) sector, trade promotional claims and deductions for the retail industry can be a minefield of complexity! Learn how Esker can solve the claims and deductions puzzle, and sweep away the confusion for finance teams.

I’m assuming everyone is too old to remember the daytime game show, Supermarket Sweep…by this, I mean the original one with Dale Winton. I’m sure the revival by Rylan was also appealing but I have a job these days so can’t comment on this version!

As an adolescent, it was the dream…. the shopping trolley dash where you could destroy the end of aisle promotions whilst trying to bag as many high value items as possible.

For some reason, when I work with customers in the order-to-cash cycle on trade promotional claims and deductions, I always think of this show.

If you’ve worked in the FMCG sector and have to deal with large retailers, you’ll know what I’m talking about! It’s like the rules of fight club – You do not talk about it, but those that know, know.

Effectively, it’s a complex web of reasons code for retailers telling suppliers why they’re not paying an invoice. Or, why they’re short paying due to marketing campaigns, rebates or promotional offers.

It’s effectively created by sales and marketing teams in large FMCG companies, making their goods more attractive to customers and trying to meet targets and sales numbers. I can certainly relate to this!

However, downstream this has created complexity for finance teams, trying to control, measure and reconcile these short payments and discounts against invoices. Sometimes trying to process these is like understanding theoretical physics – not that I’ve tried.
 

Thankfully – Esker has a solution to this pain. Esker’s Claims and Deductions solution is able to use its AI Synergy engine to automatically triage and classify these from all types of documents. This could be a deduction code quoted on a remittance, a debit note or promotional invoices sent directly to the finance or customer service teams email inbox.

Integrated into Esker Cash Application, the cash can be matched to the remittance, automatically and posted to the ERP.

Whilst the claims are being investigated, this is automatically work-flowed to the right person or team responsible for the investigating the deduction. Once approved or rejected, the corresponding posting can be made to match all the pieces together.

Esker customers are seeing incredible outcomes from this solution, such as:

• Reduction receipt to resolution time from 60 days to 1 day
• Recovering more than 70% of lost revenue from invalid deductions
• Recovering more than 500 hours from manual data entry work

Esker can now go even further; not only can we classify and triage email and documents in the customer service and finance email inbox, but we integrate with ChatGPT to suggest responses based on the language used from the customer, saving even more time and providing a better customer service.

“So next time you’re at the checkout and you hear the beep”... remember someone in a finance team is having to process that end of aisle promotion, and I hope they have Esker!