FMCG and Consumers Products
Gross revenue is up, and the topline trend looks healthy. Trade spend as a share of revenue has also crept up, quarter over quarter, without much alarm.
Then finance is asked which specific trade programs are actually profitable, and the honest answer is that nobody fully knows. Net realized price, list price minus every discount, rebate, and deduction along the way, has likely been eroding.
Without an agreed waterfall, nobody can say by how much, or where.
Trade spend as a percentage of revenue is climbing, with no reliable view of which programs are earning their return
List price, off-invoice discounts, rebates, and customer funding live in separate systems, with no single assembled view of net realized price
Retailer and distributor deductions and claims arrive faster than finance can validate them
Trade accrual reconciliation regularly becomes a late, high-effort exercise rather than a routine close
What's Actually Breaking
List price, off-invoice discounts, rebates, and customer funding sit across ERP, trade promotion systems, and individual distributor and retailer agreements. Assembling them into one waterfall from list price to what's actually realized is rarely done consistently.
Promotions get approved against a plan and a budget. Post-event measurement of actual return, by customer, program, or promotion, is often delayed, inconsistent, or disconnected from the next planning cycle, so the same assumptions carry forward largely untested.
Retailers and distributors deduct disputed amounts faster than finance can confirm they're legitimate, so the true realized margin lags well behind the cash movement.
Shows planned spend clearly, but not the true net price after every deduction and rebate actually lands.
Request a Diagnostic ConversationThorough, but too slow to inform which programs should keep running next quarter.
Break each period's price realization across list price, discounts, rebates and accruals, deductions and claims, and customer funding, using agreed rules rather than ad hoc estimation.
Where a step depends on an assumption rather than confirmed data, that's flagged explicitly.
Ownership for validating the weakest inputs is clarified before the next close.
Assemble the price waterfall consistently and flag deductions or rebate patterns that exceed an agreed threshold.
Decide which trade programs or customer terms to keep or cut. It can make the economics visible. The commercial call stays with leadership.
Decomposes net realized price across discounts, rebates, deductions, and claims to show where margin is leaking between list price and cash. Leadership leaves with a clear waterfall, a flagged list of where validation is weakest, and a prioritised view of what to fix first.
Request a Diagnostic ConversationGross revenue growth means little if nobody can trace what happened to the price behind it.
If your business is growing but reporting, workflows, data, or execution are becoming harder to manage, Kelarix can help you diagnose where better systems can create real leverage.
