Nearly every distributor uses rebates, bill-backs, and accruals to take advantage of the best deals for both themselves and their customers. Beyond just the money, these financial incentives promote certain types of behaviors that help the food supply chain function more smoothly from top to bottom. The problem: tracking it all is difficult!
This job gets even more complicated when you need unintegrated systems to handle different parts of the process. When systems are unconnected, your team’s only recourse is to download and reupload data, a time-consuming and error-prone process.
Is tying all this together becoming a nightmare for you and costing you time and labor? Do you sometimes wonder if the advantages even outweigh the amount of time your people put into it?
Let’s explore three key ways Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central can help.
Rebates and Bill Backs Are Tied to Transactions
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central is an ERP system, meaning it tracks all your financial transactions. Your accounting team uses it to keep your ledgers up-to-date and your accounts payable and receivable under control. But there’s so much more to it!
Unlike many accounting systems that become the finance team’s domain, Business Central ties directly into your operations and your industry-specific needs. By including rebates and bill backs in your ERP, this information now connects directly to financial records.
How does that help you? Quite simply, it cuts out the middleware. With all the data in one place, you can pull the reports you need on your progress and get automatically calculated totals. That’s because your accounting data is tied directly to these numbers, and no one needs to match everything up in Excel to get the report you need.
You Are Ready to Verify Any Invoice that Comes in from Your Vendors
Your vendors send you invoices and statements about your incentive plans. It’s always a best practice to review these documents against your records to ensure you or they haven’t missed anything, but that process can take time if you don’t have the right ERP solution.
Does your finance team spend more than a few minutes verifying documents from your vendors? If so, you could be saving their time with Business Central. In just a few clicks, you can get the answers you need without manipulating data outside your system or comparing two separate databases.
How much time could you save with an integrated solution like that?
Dashboards Show Your Progress—Any Time!
It’s nearly impossible to correct a problem you can’t see. With rebates, bill backs, and accruals, when it’s time to invoice, you’ve already won or lost. You can tell how well you did before in the last period, but you can never know how close you are to meeting your goals in the current period. That makes it hard to prioritize and meet your objectives.
Since your incentives are tracked with your accounting records, Business Central allows you to create the dashboards of your dreams. Power BI from Microsoft works seamlessly with Business Central, allowing you to see your data in real-time and display it in visualizations that clearly show you where you stand.
If you had a few more weeks to influence whether you qualified for the total rebate you’re eligible for, could you do something to make it happen?
Ready to Streamline Your Earned Income Processes?
If you have been reading along and seeing yourself in these struggles, the good news is that Business Central can help. Moreover, with a Microsoft Partner like Innovia Consulting, you know you are in friendly hands. Our team has decades of combined experience working in the food distribution industry, so we’ve seen the challenges you face each day—And their solutions, too!
Want to see more about how Business Central can help? We invite you to attend our free webinar (or watch it on-demand if you are reading this after 3/30/2021), where we’ll show you how Business Central alleviates many of the struggles you face in your business.
