For distributors
Stop losing money on unclaimed company schemes
Ask your team right now how much the companies owe you. You will get an estimate, prefaced by a caveat, from one person who half-remembers — and that is what happens when scheme terms live in PDFs and settlements arrive as credit notes naming no scheme.
14-day free trial · no credit card
The number nobody in your business has ever seen
There are three questions a distributor should be able to answer about company money. Most can answer one.
- What have I claimed that is not yet settled? Answerable, with effort. Someone has a list.
- What was settled short, and by how much? Harder. The credit notes are there; matching them line by line to claims is an afternoon nobody has.
- What am I entitled to under live schemes that I have not claimed at all? Almost nobody can answer this, and it is where the money is.
The reason is structural. A pending claim exists as a record. An unclaimed entitlement exists nowhere. No document was ever created, so nothing in your ledger, your P&L or any report knows it should have been. It stays invisible until something computes what the scheme terms actually entitle you to — which is the difference between a claims list and a claim tracker.
Track every scheme and back-end incentive down to the paisa
RebateLedger holds your scheme terms as rules, not documents. Once a circular is recorded — reference, period, qualifying SKUs, basis, slab table, cap, claim window — entitlement is computed as your purchases post.
- Entitlement, computed. Not remembered, not estimated at quarter end. Calculated from the terms as transactions happen, so the gap between what you have earned and what you have claimed is a number on a screen rather than a suspicion.
- Scheme versions with effective dates. When a company revises a scheme mid-period, purchases before the revision stay governed by the terms live then. Systems holding one set of terms per counterparty reprice history silently, and nothing errors.
- Claim windows as derived deadlines. The window is recorded on the agreement and the deadline is calculated from it, not typed. An entitlement that expires unclaimed has no recovery route.
- Claims tracked by state. Prepared, submitted, acknowledged, under validation, query raised, approved, credit note issued, reconciled — so you always know who is waiting on whom.
The arithmetic underneath is covered in the open guides: volume rebates and whole-volume slabs, QPS and quantity schemes, and what free goods and scheme goods really cost.
Save hours on manual ledger matching
A credit note arrives. It names an amount and a date. It does not name a scheme, a period, or a claim. So it goes to a general account, the claim it settled stays open, and it may be chased again. Repeat across a hundred notes a month and the reconciliation stops happening — not because anyone decided to stop, but because it stopped being possible in the time available.
RebateLedger reconciles settlements back to the claims and schemes they came from, matching on amount, party, period and scheme reference where those exist, and surfacing what it cannot match rather than burying it. Short settlements come out as a list of specific differences you can query — and a query on a specific line gets answered, where a query on a total does not. Where that money escapes across a whole programme is mapped in revenue leakage in rebate programs.
What it holds
- 1. Scheme register. One row per circular, entered the day it arrives — including the two fields people skip, whether the scheme is whole-volume or stepped, and the claim window.
- 2. Tagged purchases. Qualifying transactions linked to the schemes they qualify for, as they post.
- 3. Computed entitlement. Qualifying value × rate, capped where a cap applies, net of returns where the scheme says so.
- 4. Claims, by state. Every claim through the eight states from prepared to reconciled.
- 5. Settlements, matched. Credit notes tied to the claims and schemes they settle.
- 6. Ageing by company. Unsettled claims aged per company, not blended — a single blended number tells you nothing you can act on.
What it is not
Being direct about this, because vendor pages usually are not.
- Not an ERP. It does not replace Tally, SAP, or whatever you run your books in. It reads from them.
- Not a DMS. It does not manage your beats, your outlets or your field team.
- Not accounting software. It computes what you are owed; your books stay where they are.
- Not a pricing tool. It does not set prices, optimise them, or forecast promotions.
It does one thing: it answers what you are owed that you have not asked for.
Where to start
You do not need software to start. You need the scheme terms written down somewhere a calculation can reach — a scheme register, your purchases tagged to it, and entitlement computed. That will take you a long way, and it will break in four predictable places: scheme versioning mid-period, someone having to type every circular in, credit-note matching at volume, and two people editing the same sheet.
Move when those limits cost more than the alternative, and not before. The structure to build is set out in what a case actually costs you, the signs you have outgrown it in distributor claim settlement software, and the vocabulary in the types of trade schemes in India.
Frequently asked questions
What does RebateLedger do for a distributor?
It records your scheme terms as rules, computes what you are entitled to as purchases post, tracks every claim through to settlement, and reconciles received credit notes back to the schemes they settle — so you can see not only what is pending but what you never claimed at all.
How is this different from tracking claims in Excel?
A spreadsheet tracks the claims you raised. The harder problem is entitlement you never claimed, which requires computing from scheme terms independently of any claim. Spreadsheets also break on scheme versioning mid-period, credit-note matching at volume, and concurrent editing. Start in Excel, and move when those limits cost more than the alternative.
Does it replace our ERP or Tally?
No. It reads transaction data from the systems you already run, and holds the scheme terms, entitlement calculation, claim tracking and settlement reconciliation those systems do not.
What about schemes that change mid-period?
Scheme terms are versioned with effective dates, so purchases before a revision are computed on the terms that were live then. This is the failure that quietly reprices history in systems holding only current terms, and it is the most common single finding in rebate audits.
What happens to the claim window?
The window is recorded on the agreement as a number of days, and the claim deadline is derived from it rather than typed. An entitlement that expires unclaimed has no recovery route, so the deadline being calculated — not remembered — is the point.
How much unclaimed entitlement is typical?
It varies too widely by claim discipline and scheme documentation for any figure to be meaningful — treat quoted percentages with suspicion. What is consistent is that businesses without a scheme register cannot state the number at all, and those that start computing entitlement are usually surprised by its size.
What do I need to get started?
Your live scheme circulars and your purchase data. The scheme terms are the input that does not exist anywhere else in your business, and everything else follows from having them recorded.
See it on your own data in 60 seconds
Start a free trial and import your customers and products, or launch an instant demo sandbox pre-loaded with realistic claims.