DistributionReconciliation

Finding more dollars without adding more people

Regional professional manufacturer’s representative for restaurant equipment

80–90%less time spent reconciling commission reports

8 → 2FTEs on reconciliation

800orders verified every month

The challenge

As a reseller and distributor for commercial food service equipment, the company relies on accuracy to place orders with manufacturers at contracted prices on behalf of its clients, and again when receiving commissions for the sales it makes. Reconciling customer quotes with purchase orders, turning the POs into manufacturer orders, and then tracking commission rates for sales it makes against contracted agreements and orders placed is critical to ensuring the company receives its fair cut of sales.

Each month, eight employees manually combed through paper reports with thousands of invoices and items to reconcile commission amounts paid against contracted agreements and dispute errors with manufacturers. It often took an entire month.

The solution

FormedAI overhauled and automated the entire order reconciliation process. First, it created a system to digitally receive and process customer POs and reconcile them against quotes for accuracy and changes. The PO, consisting of orders for several different manufacturers, is split and orders sent to appropriate brands.

Secondly, FormedAI created a data extraction and workflow process to take each month’s commissions report, pull out every invoice and line item, and check the commission rate paid against the contracted amount for each item stored in a database. Exceptions are flagged for staff review. Reconciliation now takes just hours.

The results

The company reduced by 80-90% the employee time spent reconciling commission reports. FTEs down from 8 to 2, who now just handle exceptions.
Increased accuracy in quote-to-PO verification across 800 orders per month.
Redeployed 6 FTEs who were solely focused on this task before.
Digitization has surfaced vast performance data previously unseen, like quote conversion rate and item profitability, now available in analytics dashboards.

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