Solving For Half A Billion Dollars Of Deductions With Accounts Receivable Automation

Challenges in Deductions

Church & Dwight Had No Visibility Into The ~170,000 Disputes Raised Annually

As the CPG business landscape remains conducive to valid trade promotion discounts & compliance issues, manufacturers like Church & Dwight persistently try to recover every penny of the non-trade deduction claims raised by customers. But with the existing ERP capabilities at Church & Dwight, most of their deductions lay unidentified. The deductions team faced trouble investigating & prioritizing the recoverable dollar amounts, and the dispute resolution process failed to make any headway.

25% Of The FTE Work Hours Were Invested In Just Identifying And Coding The Deductions

Multiple disparate systems plus frequent to-and-fros across several teams led to delay in closing the disputes. Without any automation, the deductions team had to submit to the ordeal of extensive manual processes. The team had to manually gather all the backup documents and data relevant to every dispute raised across several different sources like ERP, TPM, emails, customer portals, etc.

Lack of Visibility Into The $5M Worth of Deductions Written Off Annually

Like most other CPG companies, Church & Dwight had a policy of writing off any deductions under a threshold value of $100. Due to frequent low-dollar value short payments claimed by the large retailers, Church & Dwight wrote off deductions worth ~$5M every year under this tolerance. As a result of broken visibility, low-dollar value deductions emerged as a significant pitfall because it was hard to track them down and gauge their overall impact on the bottom-line.