Profitably scaling wholesale distribution is no joke. If you don’t want to sacrifice too much of your top line to retailer deductions, you need an eagle eye and an airtight dispute strategy.
Since bringing deduction management entirely in-house is a heavy lift, most fast-growing CPGs onboard third-party solutions. But not just any partner will win you back every dollar you’re owed. The most potent solutions combine AI efficiency with human expertise.
In this guide, we’ll break down why that is. Then, we’ll take you behind the scenes of the human-AI collab that powers Glimpse’s winning deductions strategy.
Why Standalone Deduction Management Solutions Fall Short
While many deduction management solutions claim to streamline deductions and put money back in your pocket, most lack the comprehensiveness to follow through:
- Legacy software is too manual: These tools may collect and organize all your deductions. But you’re left with the bulk of the categorizations — if not all of them. You also have to file disputes yourself and manage follow-ups with distributors. Ultimately, this manual work eats up your team’s valuable time and jeopardizes your win rates.
- AI-only software lacks human oversight: While AI-only options attempt to automate the entire categorization and dispute process, most are too error-prone to fly solo on high-stakes financial processes. They simply don’t have the contextual awareness and discernment to accurately classify every line item or handle every dispute. The result is more frequent rejections and overlooked recovery opportunities.
- Human-only solutions (aka services) aren’t transparent: Some teams opt out of tools entirely, selecting service-only solutions. These work to an extent, but there’s a catch: With deductions siloed from the rest of your financials, you relinquish visibility and control over your trade spend. As a result, you can’t proactively improve forecasts to optimize your budgets and manage your cash flow.
“Leadership doesn’t always realize how much busywork legacy software is. When I used these tools in the past, it took me 10 clicks just to pull up a single document.” — Miguel Rivera, Deductions Expert at Glimpse
Glimpse Unites the Power of AI with Hands-On Human Expertise
We founded Glimpse to cover all your deduction management bases: AI to automate and humans to tirelessly advocate.
While our AI tackles time-intensive tasks like categorization, our seasoned experts craft winning strategies that turn disputes into recovered revenue. All the while, you enjoy full visibility into our process — not to mention unlimited access to our expert deductions and forecasting insights.
Glimpse gives you all the tools you need to take charge of your trade spend and keep cash flow solid.
The Deductions Whizzes Who Make it Happen
It takes a lot of hearts and minds to offer a winning deduction management solution. Here are a couple of the faces behind ours:
- Bibi Panday: Bibi’s deductions experience stretches back 8 years, including time at CPG powerhouses like Roland Foods and Waterloo Sparkling Water. When she’s not recouping revenue for her clients, Bibi loves hiking, visiting port cities, and exploring new cultures through food and travel. Her latest adventure? Eating fried conch in the Bahamas.
- Miguel Rivera: With a decade of experience recovering revenue for brands like Impossible Foods and the Campbell Soup Company, Miguel knows his way around CPG deductions. After hours, Miguel is still a self-proclaimed “big CPG lover,” counting brands like Zab’s Hot Sauce and Glimpse customer Beekeeper Coffee among his faves.
Together, Bibi, Miguel, and the rest of our deductions experts have helped dozens of high-growth brands, including Beekeeper, Kin Euphorics, and TCHO, recover $3.2M in revenue at a 91% win rate.
“Seeing dollars go out the door without any tangible justification can be really scary for growing CPGs. I love holding customers’ hands through the process and showing them that deductions aren’t as daunting as they seem.” — Bibi Panday, Deductions Expert at Glimpse
How Our Humans and AI Work Together to Win
Even as AI advances faster than ever, one thing remains clear: it can’t operate without the oversight of human experts like Bibi and Miguel.
That’s why we work hard at Glimpse to ensure seamless AI-human handoffs.
Here’s how our deductions go down:
- Our AI systematically categorizes every deduction (including trade and non-trade) according to deduction codes, then gathers all the relevant internal documentation (promo calendars, POs, BOLs, etc.) to back them up.
- A member of our team reviews all the AI’s work, cross-references it with the documentation, and occasionally requests more information from you if needed. Then, we officially mark the deduction as “valid” or “invalid.”
- Our expert initiates the dispute process for all invalid deductions, including the first email to the distributor and all the follow-ups it takes to get your money back.
- Finally, Glimpse’s AI connects every line item charge to the right codes in your general ledger, pushing the credit memo through to your accounting system or ERP.
According to our team, this system is so effective because it eliminates all the manual trouble of classifying and document gathering, while still giving our experts full sign-off on the AI’s work.
“I see our process at Glimpse as a kind of relay race. The AI holds the baton for the first three legs, gathering and classifying all the information. But the human is the anchor who actually crosses the finish line and files the winning dispute.” — Miguel Rivera, Deductions Expert at Glimpse
A “Glimpse” Inside Our Expert Analysts’ Day-to-Day
So, what exactly do Bibi and Miguel do all day? In short, everything they can to safeguard your bottom line.
Let’s pull back the curtain:
Being Proactive, Not Just Reactive
Traditional solutions — especially legacy software — are only built to respond to invalid deductions reactively. “We like to be more proactive,” Miguel explains. “We get to the root cause of the problem to figure out why you’re getting dinged with the same deductions over and over again.”
Say a recurring shipment is consistently signed for as complete, but you keep getting the same suspicious pallet deduction. Legacy software won’t help you spot that discrepancy and fight it with a paper trail of PODs.
When Miguel used incomplete solutions in the past, he spent 30 hours a week knee-deep in documentation and deduction categorizations. This left only 10 hours each week to file disputes — and zero time to identify patterns and combat them.
But by automating so much, Glimpse frees up substantial time for Miguel and Bibi to dispute deductions and build strategies that win.
Fighting the Edge Cases That AI Can’t Understand
While AI may be able to detect more patterns than a legacy solution, it still can’t read all the nuances necessary to fully go to bat for you.
To that end, our experts also harness their expertise to take on the disputes that need a human touch. “There’s all kinds of context that only a human can pick up on,” Bibi explains. “Especially for niche cases that require an extra layer of reasoning, like when you have to resubmit after getting initially rejected.”
She and Miguel can each name a million times they’ve had to pull out their deductions savvy to navigate back-and-forths with distributors. In fact, Miguel recently caught a wildly invalid deduction for the coffee brand Beekeeper.
After spotting a $17K deduction that seemed to appear out of nowhere, he took it to the distributor. When the distributor rejected his dispute and responded with the invoice as proof, Miguel realized the deduction was intended for a jam brand — not Beekeeper. “In the end, we got the full amount back,” he says. “But you have to be persistent and never miss a step.”
Advising on Best Practices
The other essential service that no other solution can offer? Hot tips to help you improve your processes and maximize your cash flow. “We may do everything for you, but unlike service-only solutions, we’ll walk you through our process step by step and give you the visibility to improve future outcomes,” Bibi explains.
Whether they notice you setting dispute thresholds too low (like wasting resources on $50 deductions) or overlooking the opportunity to apply off-invoice discounts to your invoices, Miguel and Bibi will let you know.
Our experts even offer high-level forecasting advice so you can better align promo spend with actuals. For example, we might remind you to build the 1-2% spoilage allowance into your KeHE budget since it’s fixed off every invoice.
Put simply, our team does everything in their power to help you transform a notoriously black-box process into clear steps and bottom-line savings.
Racking up irl wins: immi
Just ask this beloved (and celebrity-backed!) instant ramen brand. Since tapping into Glimpse’s AI-assisted expert team, immi has already recovered $50K+ and counting while saving $60K in accounting costs.
Start Recovering Revenue Today
Glimpse’s AI efficiency and human expertise are the one-two punch you need to win.
Want to see how much our team can recover for you? Book a demo today!
