How a 38-store home improvement chain got $4.4M back from its supplier invoices

The problem

Northfield Home and Hardware runs 38 stores, sells $320M a year and buys $195M from 640 suppliers. Cost changes arrive as supplier letters, promotional funding is agreed by buyers over email, and freight allowances sit in each supplier's terms. None of it reaches the ERP.

Accounts payable matched 36,000 invoice lines a month, and checking one line against its cost letter took 40 minutes. The team could not do that at volume. Flagged lines were overridden and paid, and price decreases never got flagged at all.

What Seeft found

Seeft read 1,400 cost letters and buyer emails, then repriced all 431,000 lines from the past 12 months against the cost in force on each invoice date.

• 4.3 percent of lines were billed off the agreed cost, a net $2.9M overpaid, mostly decreases applied weeks late.
• Buyers had confirmed $3.6M of promotional funding, and $1.95M of it was never billed to the supplier.
• 2,300 qualifying orders were invoiced without their freight allowance, $610K.

What Seeft got back

Seeft sent each supplier one claim a month with the supplier's own cost letter attached, and followed every claim until the credit posted in the ERP. Within 12 months, $2.3M of price variances, $1.6M of promotional funding and $520K of freight allowances came back.

Seeft now flags each cost letter the day it arrives, so the error rate is down to 0.7 percent of lines. Two of the four AP staff moved off the exception queue and onto supplier follow-up.