Lost & Found: Rediscovering Revenue through Trade Spend Analysis

Testimonial

“As a CPG business we have a lot to keep track of. One benefit of having accurate, robust financials is that they can highlight operational issues in your business that you were previously unaware of, and that’s exactly what our work with Zeritaz revealed. Thanks to this discovery we were able to improve some of our fulfillment processes and improve our gross margin!”

- Co-Founder, VP of Finance

Company Info

Industry: CPG

Revenue: ~$7M/annum

Other: Steadily growing at ~11%/MoM

Overview & Situation

CPG businesses who work with large distributors typically incur distributor-assigned discounts known as “Trade Spend”. There are dozens of different types of “off-invoice” trade spend deductions and keeping track of these deductions requires additional accounting processes that must be managed diligently. Our Zeritaz team immediately noticed that a strange charge began appearing regularly and was indicating that we were sending less product than the amount invoiced.

Solution

In this case, our team was already doing what was necessary to catch this issue. The only thing left to do is to make the client leadership aware of the discrepancy we were seeing in our financial activity and brainstorm what we needed to do next.

Impact

In many instances, these charges were accurate, and the client used this feedback to improve operational processes that prevented further trade spend deductions like this, effectively boosting our gross margin. In other cases, the distributors were incorrect, and we were able to recover lost revenue through disputes. The numbers don’t lie and if you carefully examine them, you might be surprised what they tell you!