Trade Deduction Matching and Disputes

This concept is a FluidGrids workflow for the deductions retailers take from their payments to a consumer goods supplier. Trade promotions, shortages, damaged goods and on-time-in-full fines are often settled by the retailer simply paying less, and every deducted line has to be checked, cleared or disputed before the retailer's dispute window closes. The design envisions one run per remittance that sends every line down the right path.

In FMCG and consumer goods, deduction checking tends to live in spreadsheets, with the evidence spread across promotion agreements, delivery records and the retailer's sales reports. Valid claims wait as long as invalid ones, and a shortage claim that a delivery record would have disproved can slip past the window because nobody found the proof in time.

The illustration shows the Retailer Deduction Matching workflow on the builder canvas, on an active version with Validate and Run controls. A remittance-received trigger for a sample grocery retailer carries its deduction lines into PDF extraction, a match against two promotion agreements on file and a step that reads the retailer's sales report for a range of weeks, while a proof-of-delivery lookup in MoveTheWheels feeds in from above. A versioned deduction rule then routes each line. Matched promotion lines are cleared against the agreement; scan rebates the sales report agrees with are cleared as rebates; shortages where the proof of delivery shows full delivery become a drafted dispute with that proof attached; on-time-in-full fines go to an appointment check that waits for an analyst's decision; and lines with no match go to analyst review. Every path carries a sample line count and ends in a BigConsole DataSink for the deductions ledger. A side panel sums up today's run with lines read, cleared, disputes drafted and lines awaiting an analyst, warns that the dispute window closes in a few days and names the largest open claim, and the logs end with a warning that shortage claims contradict the delivery record.

Two other Burdenoff products take part by design. MoveTheWheels is designed to supply the proof of delivery kept on each shipment, so shortage, damage and on-time-in-full claims are tested against what was actually delivered. BigConsole is designed to receive the results, along with retailer sales, through the DataSink, giving finance and trade marketing one ledger of what was cleared, disputed and still open. The weekly sales report itself is designed to be collected by a separate scheduled workflow. FluidGrids holds the extraction, the versioned rule and the pause for anything the rule cannot decide, so analysts spend their time on the lines that need judgment.