How do you make the most of your sales rebates? How can you maximize margins? What do you need to do to simplify the process? And how does rebate automation deliver results in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central?
Sales rebates are a popular way for our clients to incentivize their customers to buy larger volumes. Often the accounting to administer these schemes is time consuming, complicated and provides limited visibility.
Our Rebates app for Dynamics 365 Business Central is designed to simply manage rebates, regain control, and recover potential losses. It automatically captures, accrues, and reports rebates. Best of all, it ensures businesses have the right information when it counts.
Here, we deep-dive into ways to get more out of rebates and improve your bottom line.
What is a sales rebate in B2B?
A rebate in business is a form of a refund. It’s a popular business tool used to simply return a portion of a purchase price by a seller or buyer.
Often it can be a way to reward the purchase of a quantity or value of goods in a specific period. But the difference between rebates and discounts can be confusing. Discounts are usually factored at the time of invoicing. Unlike discounts, rebate returns are made periodically, either at time of payment, or round the time the agreement ends.
Rebates can be a tool to incentivise buyers to make larger purchases. They can create demand for high margin products, move old inventory, or drive revenue and volume growth in a particular product line. Unfortunately, many manufacturers struggle to manage rebates. They often make miscalculations that incur financial loss.
How do you avoid rebates errors and losses?
Rebates can be more complex than meets the eye mostly due to the multiple types of sales rebates and tendency for accrual miscalculations.
Big vendors often trade with many types of sales rebates for different purposes such as volume, warehouse, growth, product mix or marketing rebates.
Unfortunately, rebate programs can be difficult to manage and execute. The different rebate types and the number of programs create huge administrative challenges. Trying to record and keep track of the different agreements and the frequent changes are a common source of frustration.
As a result, finance departments often need to perform re-calculations manually in age-old spreadsheets. These time-consuming tasks often lead to data entry errors and losses. As more data is added, not only does the likelihood of entry errors increase, but it also gets harder to extract the data the sales teams, finance teams and regulators need.
The Business Central sales rebates gap
Are you a Dynamics 365 Business Central user? That’s great, but it doesn’t cover the workflows, filters and categories needed to manage results across different types of rebates. Natively it does not offer the functionality to calculate and accrue rebates at time of sale.
Our clients have always relied on sales reporting at period ends to calculate possible rebates. This can be a time-consuming process and not always possible to do at the level of detail required. The lack of functionality and automation can trigger inefficiencies, frustration, and even strained business relationships. But there is a way to leap ahead.
Fenwick’s Rebates App helps to regain control and profitability
When rebates are centralised in one place and managed, it’s easier to track them. It’s easier to expedite workflows, reduce errors, and improve profit margins. Beyond speed and accuracy, our app provides:
- Full visibility into what is accrued
- Real time, sales line level rebate calculations at time of invoicing
- Simple, intuitive configuration mirroring existing Business Central pricing and discounting in real time
- Potential sales line rebate calculations at time of invoicing
- Automated accruals at the time of invoicing
- Powerful reporting through a Power BI companion app to realise upcoming Rebate claims
Getting started with Rebates
Most businesses will need a purpose-built app to process rebates in a Business Central environment. The good news is our Rebates app is a simple, fast, and low-cost way to resolve costly mismanagement and errors.
Easily configure, capture, and manage multiple rebate types in categories and sub-ledgers. It instantly eliminates the risk of calculation errors and helps to sanity check misconduct. It also makes it easy to review past performance, and even helps to predict future sales.
To find out more on setting up rebates in Business Central see: Our rebates app or from the AppSource marketplace. To preview Power BI rebates sales reports visit: Power BI Gold Rebates for Business Central
