The traditional rebate ecosystem is a mess. With manual rebate management, manufacturers and buyers continue to get tangled up in complex manual processes, which leads them to miss deals or result in subpar cash flow; it’s also not great for partner collaboration.
Is your rebate management solution leaving money on the table?
Most organizations rely heavily on spreadsheets as their go-to tool for handling rebates. This may work well for a startup or small-scale company, but the B2B trading industry is worth billions of dollars and excel sheets increase the risk of errors when dealing with large volumes of data. Moreover, they are cumbersome, time-consuming, and cannot be scaled easily.
Here’s a snag list of manual processes that businesses should worry about:
Limitations of excel sheets — The excel cookie basket can be a convoluted jumble of spreadsheets and gets complicated when managed incorrectly. It becomes even riskier if you use it to store sensitive data like financials, SKUs, customer lists, or other information that could compromise your business’s future in some way. Additionally, ensuring real-time data updates on excel sheets is clumsy, and the additional risks associated with emailing different departments asking for updates on certain tasks become untenable and counterproductive.
Key-person risk: If you depend on one key person for manual data entry or managing the overall rebate management process, your business may be at risk. This can hamper the effective management of tracking transactions across multiple locations because only a single person would have access to and knowledge about all these processes, which could cause delays in processing rebates and tracking cash flows.
Error-prone: Mistakes are hard to identify, as are formula errors, complex macros, and data input errors, thanks to the ‘fat finger syndrome’ on the excel sheet. Besides this, Supplier Manual Process x Buying Group Manual Process x Member Manual Process = exponential opportunities for errors; a surefire path to disaster. Error-fixing slows down processes and could also result in inter-department conflicts.
Disconnect with accounts payable: Traditional legacy systems or manual processes used for rebate management are siloed and not connected to accounts payable. Also, manual processes in accounts payable lead to data error opportunities with incorrect invoices and billing information. This is avoidable in digitized rebate management processes.
Difficulty in sharing and updating information: Over-reliance on manual processes reduces shareability and efforts to update information. Excel sheets offer little inter-departmental visibility in real-time. For instance, Kelly, a sales manager, might offer last-minute rebates towards the end of a quarter to strategic customer accounts in her geography to meet the expected sales forecast. When Finance & Accounts becomes suddenly aware of this deal as they close the quarter’s accounts, challenges abound in integrating deal details on time.
Lack of interoperability: Manual data entry involves an extremely tedious and exasperating process of transferring information from one data source to another. It could lead to missed data with erroneous toggling while transferring data.
Hundreds of rebates span an organization’s rebate portfolio. Is your business able to track hundreds of deals and missing out by not being able to identify the programs that have the highest return on purchases? Have you considered a digital rebate management platform that can help you achieve rebate democratization?
Need more convincing on why manual processes are not the best way forward to manage your rebate ecosystem? Watch this.
How can an intelligent rebate management platform help you transform rebates into revenue opportunities and sustain growth momentum?
Digitalized rebate management solutions are the way forward, no matter what industry you’re in. It increases revenue and margins while cutting costs by eliminating tedious manual processes. With Rebate.ai’s automated accounting features and standardized processes, like central product catalogs and centralized rebate management, you can easily automate and manage multi-party, multi-product, and multi-tiered rebate schemes. In addition, you can rest easy knowing that your business is fully compliant with all regulations thanks to the robust group compliance measurement on this platform.
Rebate.ai platform simplifies the rebate process and accelerates rebate ROI
Our revolutionary, cloud-native, SaaS-based rebate platform provides a seamless interface to users for better collaboration between all stakeholders in the rebate ecosystem. It is designed to track and analyze program performance. Here’s how:
Decision Intelligence — Our rebate platform is programmed with advanced analytics to deliver real-time, contextual insights for all stakeholders in the rebate system. It brings multi-dimensional and multi-departmental intelligence and clarity to the complicated rebate ecosystem.
Competitive analysis — Rebate.ai provides a deep dive analysis into competitor activity by analyzing reams of data on competition, allowing your teams to re-invent rebate schemes to outsmart competitor activity.
Missed opportunity identification — Our digital rebate platform overcomes systemic inefficiencies and limited real-time views in manual processes with predictive and prescriptive analysis. This ensures that opportunities for better-performing rebates are not missed.
Workflow automation — Our rebate management services team provides strategic advisory to help design the necessary workflows that need to be automated, saving manpower cost, time, and minimizing conflicts.
Smart insights and alerts — Our platform helps maximize market share, minimize loss and secure customer loyalty. The AI engine can harness data from several data points across enterprise-wide systems such as ERP, SCM, and CRM, and derive smart insights for rebate managers to take action.
Unified data & vocabulary — With robust API and NLP integrations, our rebate platform creates a single source of unified data. Moreover, NLP integrations help with building vocabulary.
Automate the manual rebate management process to improve operational efficiency, reduce financial risk and increase your business's profitability.
Re-imagining rebate management will be vital for businesses to thrive in today’s competitive landscape, especially as supply chains become increasingly complex. Intelligent solutions, driven by AI, can simplify and overcome the challenges inherent in the rebate ecosystem and eliminate outdated manual processes. It will equip organizations with the scalability and agility critical to navigating the new paradigm. Improved flexibility and visibility into cash flows are key competitive advantages that separate the victors from the rest. Therefore, businesses need to invest in AI-powered, end-to-end rebate management, and analytics platform to succeed.
Ready to eliminate manual processes and embrace agility? Book a demo with us to discover how Rebate.ai can bring decision intelligence into your traditional rebate ecosystem.
