Ask your team what your rebate programs are worth this year and you'll get a number, fast. Ask what you actually collected against them last year and the room goes quiet. That gap isn't a reporting problem. It's the most reliable margin leak in CPG.
Your team isn't failing to claim. They're doing the math.
Here's the part that gets misdiagnosed as discipline. Chasing a claim costs money, and often more money than the claim. Inmar's analysis of chargeback economics puts it plainly: a $200 deduction can take $300 to $500 of internal staff time to research, document, and contest. At that exchange rate, abandoning the small stuff is the correct decision. Anyone spending four hours to recover $200 is destroying value, and they know it.
So claims get filed for the tiers that are easy to prove and quietly dropped for the ones that aren't. Not from carelessness. From arithmetic. The problem was never diligence, it was unit economics, and that means more effort was never going to fix it.
The scale is what makes this expensive. Trade spend usually runs 15 to 25 percent of gross sales, the second-largest line after COGS. A rounding error on your second-largest cost isn't a rounding error.
Every condition is evidenced somewhere different
Trade programs are conditional by design. Volume tiers, growth targets, compliance requirements, display commitments. Each condition is a place the claim can fail, and each one is proved in a different place. Volume is in your ERP. Compliance is in photos, retailer portals, and somebody's email. Nobody assembles all of it, because assembling it is the expensive part.
Deductions run the same play in reverse. The retailer deducts, cites a program, and the burden of disproof lands on the team that has neither the hours nor the evidence in one place. So the deduction sticks. Research puts 10 to 20 percent of deductions in the written-off-as-unrecoverable pile, usually for want of documentation rather than merit. Meanwhile brands with a structured dispute process recover somewhere between 30 and 60 percent of invalid deductions. Same deductions. Different evidence.
The five patterns that surface first
- Volume tiers you crossed and never claimed.
- Growth rebates where the baseline got calculated on the wrong period.
- Deductions taken against programs that were already settled.
- Duplicate deductions for one promotion under two references.
- Accruals still sitting on the books past the claim window.
Evidence is the product, not the finding
Detection is the easy half here, which is why trade spend is different from most recovery work. Knowing a tier was crossed changes nothing on its own. The claim is worth exactly what you can document.
So every finding our agents produce arrives assembled: the program terms, the volume record, and the deduction notice in one place, ready to file or ready to dispute. That's the whole intervention. We didn't make your team more diligent. We changed what a claim costs to build, and once a claim costs minutes instead of hours, the $200 ones are worth chasing again.
Two numbers, one afternoon
You can size this yourself without talking to anyone. Take one retailer and one quarter. Count the volume tiers you crossed against the tiers you actually filed a claim for. Then count the deductions you absorbed without ever disputing them.
Those two numbers are your unclaimed rate and your write-off rate. Most teams have never seen either, because neither is a report anyone runs. If the second number is near zero, it doesn't mean the deductions were valid. It means nobody had the evidence to argue.
An accrual is a statement of what you're owed. A collection is a statement of what you could prove. Nobody pays you on the first one.