The Channel Management module helps you handle special discounts for a fixed period agreed with a customer. Transactions for the given period are typically recorded by your customer who sends you at the end of the period a spread sheet with the transactions and the claimed discount. Using Channel Management, you can quickly process the file, verify the claimed amount and pay the agreed discount back to the customer.

Background

Claims, also known as chargebacks, bill backs or ship and debit, involve a process whereby a manufacturer approves of a special price agreement with a distributor. These pricing agreements only happen after a sale has been made and an invoice has been issued reflecting the original price of products. However, a distributor may negotiate its own special prices with retail customers after items have been bought.

For that distributor to be credited after an exclusive pricing agreement has been reached with the manufacturer, distributors have to provide proof-of-sales that match the approved special pricing. There are two primary sources of friction in this practice.

The challenge around administering these distributor claims is twofold: Manufacturers selling primarily through distribution often have thousands of these special pricing agreements and are manually pricing them. On the other hand, distributors themselves also often have many thousands of these from multiple manufacturers and end-customers, which presents a nightmare when trying to determine the net cost and profit for any given deal.

Channel Management targets this friction in the distributor claims management space through automating the processing and validation of those distributor claims. A key aspect here is the product’s ability to integrate into ERP systems to obtain accurate pricing information automatically.

Capabilities

Channel Management allows you to:

• Upload claim items from the customer/distributor to a claim form in Pricefx.

• Perform automatic validation of uploaded items against data in Pricefx.

• Approve or deny individual items manually.

• Create credit memos (Claim Records) based on approved items – only selected items or all items.

• Maintain multiple claim templates (called Claim Types).

• Retrieve the transactional data from an integrated external system (instead of an Excel file).