Ask Steve Fortner, SVP of Sales at Belcam Beauty, whether a CPG brand should use Glimpse, and the answer is immediate:
I'd encourage any company to say: yes, I want to learn about it, and I need a partner to tell me what I don't know. If you're a startup that's new to a major retailer, or a legacy company looking to make your finance team more efficient, Glimpse can take a lot of that burden off them.
Steve Fortner
SVP of Sales, Belcam Beauty
That burden is exactly what Belcam set out to solve, and the results have more than paid for the decision.
Before Glimpse, Belcam Beauty's four-person finance team recovered roughly $10,000 in retailer deductions through a fully manual process that cost about six hours a week. With Glimpse, Belcam has recovered $137,425.39, more than ten times its prior baseline.
Belcam Beauty is a personal care company trusted since 1949, selling fragrance, bath and body care, and beauty tools across mass, grocery, and retail in the US and Canadian markets. It is a cruelty-free, made-in-USA brand crafted in Rouses Point, New York on Lake Champlain, with roughly 50 employees today. Its retail and distributor partners include Walmart, HEB, Meijer, Kroger, and KeHE, along with Walmart Canada and a significant overseas fragrance business in the Middle East and South America.
Deductions were owned by a lean four-person finance team (a CFO, a controller, and two people splitting accounts receivable and accounts payable), with the sales organization pulled in to supply business context on individual claims.
A Four-Person Finance Team, Six Hours a Week, and the Deductions No One Had Time to Chase
Belcam's deductions ran entirely on manual effort. The finance team logged into each retailer portal, tried to claim back what they could, and lost claims whenever paperwork was incomplete or a document was missing. The harder problem was expertise: a lean finance team can't be fluent in the dispute mechanics of every retailer at once.
As Fortner put it, "how can they be the expert on a Walmart or a Kroger or an Amazon when that's not their daily part of the business?" That knowledge gap forced them to bring in the sales team for context on every ambiguous claim and created constant back-and-forth across the organization.
The result was slow and chaotic. Fortner said the hardest part was tracking down all of the information and then keeping everyone in sync across the organization. The team worked deductions top-down by dollar size and never reached the smaller ones, even though, as Fortner later realized, "the smaller ones add up to a lot of money back that you're getting as a company." Under that manual process, Belcam recovered roughly $10,000 total, and the friction eventually made the team look for a partner who could own the workflow and the retailer knowledge behind it.
Fortner first came across Glimpse through LinkedIn posts about using AI for deductions, connected with the team, and visited the office before signing on. He evaluated other options, including vendors that bundle deductions with promotions management, but wanted a partner hyper-focused on deductions specifically.
Two things separated Glimpse in his evaluation. The first was the human expert layer. With other tools, he said, "if the bot said no, they kind of went with it," whereas Glimpse gave him "a team that feels like customer support in your corner fighting for you to get those deductions back," including proactively working retailer finance contacts. The second was usability: competing dashboards were complicated, while Glimpse gave the team transparency into every deduction with a full record behind it.
It's like the easy button for deductions now.
Steve Fortner
SVP of Sales, Belcam Beauty
From ~$10K to $137,425.39 Recovered, With Six Hours a Week Back for Finance
Glimpse has recovered $137,425.39 in deductions for Belcam, more than ten times the roughly $10,000 the team recovered under its manual process. The first win landed in under a month, and the wins have kept coming: "every two to three weeks we get an email from the team saying we got another win." A large share of that comes from the smaller deductions the team never had time to touch before.
The impact shows up across several dimensions:
They're able to do more scenario financial calculations, and they have the time to do that now. Whereas they just didn't have enough time to do it because they were bogged down in very tedious tasks.
Steve Fortner
SVP of Sales, Belcam Beauty
Belcam is running a transformation most brands run in reverse: a company trusted since 1949 and rooted in retail, now building out omnichannel and digital across Amazon, TikTok, and direct-to-consumer. Recovered dollars feed directly into that shift, going toward paying down the debt on its factory automation and reinvesting in the marketing headcount driving the digital push, which makes recovered margin part of how the company funds its own reinvention. The relationship is one Fortner is happy to put his name behind: "I'm happy to connect you with people in my network, because I fully believe in the team and what you're doing."
Glimpse is an AI-native deduction management service built for CPG brands selling through distributors and major retailers. Glimpse automates the entire deductions process — from coding and validation to dispute resolution — using AI agents trained on distributor- and retailer-specific rules. Glimpse automates the workflows overwhelming manual teams, disputing all the invalid deductions that manual teams can't address.
With Glimpse, over 200 brands have recovered invalid deductions, eliminated manual work, and improved bottom-line performance without adding headcount. Glimpse has processed over $1 billion in invoice volume. Backed by Andreessen Horowitz. Based in New York.
Highlighting successful implementations of AI in retail that enhance customer experiences and streamline operations.
