The problem is the portfolio, not the agreement
Any one supplier rebate agreement in hardware or electrical distribution is straightforward. A rate, a threshold, a window, maybe a growth baseline. The difficulty is that you have four hundred of them, they are all shaped slightly differently, and the effort of managing one properly is roughly the same whether it is worth two hundred thousand dollars or two thousand.
So the portfolio gets triaged. The top twenty agreements are managed well; the tail is managed by memory. And because the tail is long, the tail is where most of the unclaimed entitlement lives — not because any single miss is large, but because there are hundreds of them.
Pricing against a cost that is wrong
The single most consequential number in a distribution business is net-net cost: item cost after every supplier rebate and allowance. It is also, in most distributors, not available at the line.
The consequence is that pricing, quoting and margin reporting all run on gross cost. Rebate-rich lines are priced too high and lost; rebate-poor lines are priced too low and won. The business is systematically selling the wrong mix, and the P&L cannot show why because the rebates land in a different period as a lump sum.
Getting above 90% of lines priced against rebate-adjusted net cost is the highest-leverage change available to most distributors. It changes what you win.
The submission nobody reconciles
Buying-group rebates are settled on what you submit. Submissions are generated monthly by mapping your purchase data into the group’s product taxonomy. When a new SKU is uncategorised or a mapping drifts, those lines drop out — silently, because the group reports on what it received.
The control is a reconciliation, not a report: what you purchased, versus what you submitted, versus what the group settled. Three numbers that should agree and usually have never been put side by side.
What good looks like
- Above 95% of supplier agreements held as executable rules, including the small ones. This is what makes the tail affordable to manage.
- Above 90% of sold lines priced on rebate-adjusted net cost.
- Above 99% of vendor entitlement claimed inside the window.
How RevUpra runs this
Every supplier agreement — not just the top twenty — becomes a set of executable rules with a rate, a threshold, a window and a live run rate. The engine raises claims itself, in-window, so the tail stops depending on memory. Rebate-adjusted net cost is computed per item and published back so pricing and quoting decide on the real number. Buying-group submissions are generated from your purchase ledger and reconciled against what the group settled, and contractor rebates you fund accrue from transaction detail so the annual true-up stops being an event.