How Evermark Uncovered Millions in Invalid Shortage Deductions With Glimpse's AI

How Evermark Uncovered Millions in Invalid Shortage Deductions With Glimpse's AI

Evermark — a portfolio that owns popular personal care brands like Suave, ChapStick, and Q-Tips — was writing off hundreds of retailer deductions every month. In days, Glimpse's AI identified hundreds of thousands in invalid shortage deductions that Evermark never would have recovered otherwise.

The problem: Shortage deductions were draining Evermark's revenue

CPG brands lose millions in completely recoverable revenue each year, and most of it comes from a single deduction category: shortages.

When CPG brands ship products to a major retailer or distributor — Walmart, Target, Amazon, KeHE, UNFI — the retailer often pays less than the invoice. These short pays are called "deductions." Some deductions are contractual: trade spend, vendor program fees, or promotional commitments. But shortage deductions are different. A shortage occurs when a retailer claims fewer units were received than were invoiced — a short-ship or receiving-count discrepancy. They're operational, not contractual, and they're frequently invalid.

That distinction matters because invalid shortage deductions are fully contestable. They don't require renegotiating trade terms or changing commercial agreements. They require proof: accurate outbound fulfillment records, case and pallet counts, and ASN-to-PO matching that demonstrates the units were shipped as invoiced. When that documentation exists — and for most CPG brands, it does — the dispute is winnable.

The problem is that most brands don’t have the time and resources to contest each deduction. So money that could be rightfully theirs, if they were to contest the deduction, is lost.

That was the case at Evermark, parent company of brands including Suave, Chapstick. Their third-party deductions broker was automatically writing off hundreds of deductions due to a lack of resources and time. For an enterprise brand, one small write-off is a drop in the bucket. But at scale, the sheer volume of shortage deductions adds up to a torrent of lost revenue. Evermark's sub-threshold write-offs had become a silent, abandoned revenue stream: invisible on any dashboard, never flagged as recoverable.

Evermark partners with Glimpse to identify invalid shortage deductions

Glimpse ran a multi-month lookback across Evermark's largest retail channels. Within weeks, Glimpse's AI had uncovered seven figures in invalid shortage deductions that Evermark had written off. This was revenue that was recoverable all along — but Evermark's team hadn't had the time or resources to go after it.

Glimpse's AI was able to tackle Evermark's shortage deduction problem at scale. In 24 hours, a single AI agent reviewed 17,000 shortage deductions: a task that would have taken a full-time employee two years to complete. Glimpse's agents automatically retrieved fulfillment documentation, validated each shortage claim against the shipment record, and disputed invalid deductions on Evermark's behalf — across every retailer, without adding headcount or disrupting existing workflows. Evermark didn't have to onboard their teams with a new tool. Glimpse pulled the documents, checked the deductions, and uncovered the revenue automatically.

Like most major CPG brands, Evermark had to input a dollar threshold for the deductions it was able to review, because there was simply not enough time or manpower to review every last one. By automating the process with Glimpse's AI, we've not only removed that threshold, but we've unlocked a new source of incoming cash flow that will bring in millions of dollars that were previously considered a 'write off' or cost of doing business.

Sean Quinn, Senior VP of FP&A, Evermark (parent company of Suave Brands & ChapStick)

Why shortage deductions represent the largest recovery opportunity in CPG

For CPG brands shipping through major retailers, shortage deductions consistently represent one of the largest concentrations of recoverable revenue in the entire deductions portfolio. Most brands have been absorbing that cost for years without realizing how much of it was winnable. 

And it’s not a problem that’s solvable manually. Human review teams simply can't process every claim, so anything below a certain dollar amount gets written off by default. At enterprise scale, that default adds up to millions in structurally abandoned revenue, year after year.

Glimpse eliminates the threshold entirely. Because Glimpse's cost per dispute is zero regardless of dollar amount, every shortage deduction gets reviewed. A small deduction costs the same to dispute as a large one. The result is a new revenue stream that most finance teams didn't know they were leaving on the table.

About Glimpse

Glimpse is the AI-native deductions management and revenue recovery platform built for CPG. Our managed service eliminates dispute thresholds, scales deduction coverage without adding headcount, and delivers recoverable revenue from day one — across every retailer, every brand, every deduction type. No dollar thresholds. No manual bottlenecks. Full portfolio visibility from day one.