Trade Spend Programs are often a large line item on the Profit & Loss Statements of companies that distribute Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG). They are also notoriously difficult to manage, and in some companies, a full-time employee is dedicated to administering the numerous programs and buyers. When tracked manually, it can be frustrating and inaccurate. When tracked using stand-alone software, it lacks broad financial context and wastes considerable staff time reconciling with your financial solution.

The Answer Company now offers an integrated solution that extends Sage X3’s standard ERP functionality to interactively manage Trade Spend plans with Sales personnel, track deductions against individual deals, and generate meaningful analysis data to keep you focused on what matters. This means you can actually see your liabilities and owed deductions in the context of your company-wide ERP – and not waste staff time managing or reconciling.

Benefits of Trade Spend Management

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  • Anticipate Your Liabilities

    With The Answer Company's Trade Spend solution, you can clearly see your accrued liabilities and the deductions you can expect customers to take. By integrating with the financial and business management modules of your Sage ERP system, you can get a holistic look at where the balances lie and have visibility to potential issues. By seeing what’s coming, you’re able to keep accurate reserves on your balance sheet in anticipation of delayed claims. Once deductions are entered, Deal Performance data is immediately available.

  • Manage Multiple Types of Programs for each Buyer

    Trade Spend deals can take many forms: Buy-One-Get-One offers, cashback, discount coupons, preferential shelf display – the list goes on. What's more, distributors often run several concurrent programs with each customer. Trade Spend programs have traditionally been managed with tedious and error-prone manual processes. The Answer Company’s Trade Spend solution has flexible configurable rules for any number of programs that can be tied to a particular customer. Granular detail can pinpoint the correct accruals on the products that have been tied to the promotion in Sage X3.

  • Collate Promotion Data

    Trade Spend deals can be defined over various periods – annually, quarterly, or monthly. Once a Trade Spend promotion is defined within Sage X3, products can be assigned to the deal with either a discounted dollar amount or discounted dollar percentage, with or without an associated quantity. The Trade Spend module automates the accrual calculation for the Promotion that the product is tied to. This data provides a forecast of what each customer may owe you at any stage of the Trade Spend Promotion deal, plus give insight into how a certain deal is performing with a customer. It will let you see high-level dollar amounts by category and customer, or more granular detail, down to specific dates, items, quantities, discounts and deduction types.

  • Free up Staff Time

    Management of Trade Spend programs can be tedious work, combing through spreadsheets of data line-by-line to do initial calculations of accruals. This is followed by the tedium of manually checking buyer deduction claims against internal records to ensure over-claims are not paid. With the Trade Spend module, deductions can be reconciled quickly and easily, eliminating the task of combing through data to find where errors or inconsistencies lie. The employee that once played the role of clerk, managing the deals in Excel, can move towards giving timely responses to the sales or finance teams. The Trade Spend module allows for the capture of comments and the attachment of documents, giving users to access a single central data repository for all information related to the creation of a Trade Spend deal and tracking deductions.

  • Use forecasts to protect against stock shortages

    As this Trade Spend solution is tightly integrated with the Sage X3, you can leverage the tools of the system to help you plan ahead. Trade Spend data is available for long-term analytics and reporting. Over time the typical impact of a given deal can be estimated, and the results incorporated back into demand planning.

  • Track Indirect Customers

    Distributors may not sell directly to retailers and may sell to large private-label distribution centers or brokers. Despite this, it is still necessary to track the last point on the supply chain or the retailer. The end customers’ data is still needed to ensure you have an overview of which deals are working and which are not. If some of your deals involve end customers, then Trade Spend solution lets you track these indirect customers within Sage X3.

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