Every CPG brand leader is focused on three critical levers: growing topline revenue, protecting margins, and scaling efficiently without ballooning headcount.
Yet deductions quietly erode all three, eating into gross sales, draining team resources, and multiplying as you expand into more retailers. In fact, unmanaged deductions can cost you 2-3% of topline revenue — a direct hit to margin that only grows as the business scales.
That’s why solving deductions is about more than just cutting costs; it’s about unlocking capacity to grow. With the right approach, deductions can shift from a hidden drain on performance to a strategic lever that protects margins, frees team bandwidth, and fuels sustainable growth.
The True Cost Of Deductions
To protect margins while scaling, you can’t ignore deductions. Unmanaged deductions can erode up to 30% of your gross sales and absorb the equivalent of 1 to 2 full-time employees in manual work.
Every deduction requires multiple steps: retrieving documentation, classifying claims, validating against agreements, reconciling accounts, and submitting disputes. Each step demands time and attention, impacting financial outcomes and your team’s strategic focus.
And as you expand retail and distributor partnerships, the top-line revenue tied up in invalid deductions only grows. What starts as manageable quickly becomes overwhelming without automation.
Where Existing Solutions Fall Short
Your team may already use legacy software, AI-only systems, or service-only providers to manage deductions. These options result in untapped opportunities to recover revenue faster and scale operations more efficiently.
Here’s where they fall short:
Manual Processes
Tracking deductions manually demands significant time and resources. Teams often spend up to 15 hours a week pulling documents from multiple portals, inboxes, and shared folders.
Reviewing, validating, and processing 100% of deductions is nearly impossible without adding headcount. And while hiring may ease the immediate workload, it often introduces hidden leakage as errors creep in. Manual work also leaves significant revenue losses untracked, forcing your team to choose which deductions to prioritize.
Dashboards
Dashboards are systems of record. They centralize data and provide visibility into deductions, essentially serving as a historical log. But visibility alone doesn’t drive results.
Your team is still responsible for retrieving documents, classifying claims, validating against agreements, reconciling accounts, and filing disputes — keeping the process reactive. As deduction volumes grow, visibility without action creates bottlenecks, delays, and missed recovery opportunities.
AI-Added Tools
Software that layers AI on top of traditional workflows can flag potential deduction issues, but it’s not mature enough to resolve or correctly classify these deductions without human oversight.
Your team often still needs to validate claims manually and follow up, keeping you tied to repetitive work instead of actually winning revenue back. And because nuanced cases are easy for AI to misclassify, errors slip through, driving up rejection rates and avoidable revenue loss.
The AI-Native Advantage
Instead of leaving deductions as a manual, reactive cost center, shifting to an AI-native approach streamlines workflows, improves accuracy, and lays the groundwork for future growth.
An AI-native system proactively handles every step of the deductions workflow. This includes retrieval, classification, validation, reconciliation, and dispute resolution, all completed without manual intervention.
While legacy record systems only flag problems for your team to chase, action systems close the loop end-to-end. They automatically review, validate, and resolve every deduction at scale.
Migrating to an AI-native approach can feel daunting. However, deductions are the perfect entry point because the work is high-volume, repetitive, rules-based, and structured enough for robust automation. That’s why fast-growing brands like immi, who are hitting key growth inflection points, have seen outsized returns after adopting this approach, recovering $50,000 in nine months while saving $60,000 in accounting costs annually.
While the strategic shift is powerful, the true measure of impact lies in how automation drives real, measurable business growth.
Turning Deductions Into A Growth Lever
Once deductions are fully automated, the results compound quickly. Every line item is reviewed and every invalid deduction disputed, delivering 10x better recovery outcomes than traditional workflows.
The financial upside is direct and measurable. Automation helps your team recapture gross sales eroded by deductions, directly boosting the bottom line and protecting margins as your business scales. Kin Euphorics, for example, won $10,000 from a single disputed chargeback through automated resolution.
The operational impact is equally significant. Reclaiming dozens of hours a month enables your team to dedicate more energy to strategic projects. This redirects their energy toward initiatives that directly contribute to revenue growth, instead of repetitive manual reconciliation. And because the system continuously learns and improves, ROI scales with your business.
Ultimately, automating deductions transforms a drain on resources into a reliable growth engine, delivering high-ROI outcomes at scale.
Why Glimpse Is Different
Glimpse is the only AI-native platform built to manage deductions from start to finish. It transforms the entire workflow into an automated, outcomes-driven process. That’s what makes us not just faster, but fundamentally better.
Here’s how we deliver 10x better recovery outcomes:
100% Coverage Without More Headcount
Unlike legacy tools that simply centralize documents or workflows, we resolve every step in the process automatically.
From retrieving retailer files to classifying, validating, reconciling, and disputing every deduction — even those as small as $50 — we ensure nothing slips through the cracks. This stops revenue leakage, saves time, and lets you scale without adding staff.
AI Where It Counts, Humans Where It Matters
We combine the speed and scale of AI automation with the nuanced judgment of in-house deductions specialists.
Our AI categorizes each deduction, retrieves supporting documentation, and codes every line item in your general ledger. Then, our experts review the AI’s work, validate claims, and initiate disputes for all invalid deductions, closing the gap between automation and results. This approach drives higher dispute success rates, reflected in our 91% win rate.
Proactive Insights That Drive Growth And Margin
Alongside automation, we deliver actionable insights that turn deductions into a source of intelligence, not just a cost to manage.
We track key metrics like Days Deductions Outstanding (DDO) and deduction trends, including slotting fees, shortages, and promotional allowances. This helps your team forecast more accurately and optimize trade spend.
Efficiency That Compounds Over Time
The more data our system processes, the smarter it gets, turning deductions into a self-improving, scalable process.
This smarter automation increases classification accuracy and streamlines every step to deliver significant results. Our clients have achieved ROI ranging from 5x to 33x as the platform recovers more revenue over time. Each deduction makes the process more efficient, transforming a once-manual task into a dependable growth driver.
Start Recovering Revenue Today
As one of the most powerful, low-risk, high-reward AI applications available, AI-native automation has redefined what’s possible for deductions. It delivers immediate ROI, safeguards margin, and creates scalable capacity.
Ready to stop losing revenue and start unlocking it? Book a demo today to see how leading brands use Glimpse to recover millions while fueling growth.
