FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
Trade Promotion Services improve ROI by providing end-to-end visibility and control over trade spend, from promotion planning and accruals to deductions and final settlement.
Accurate, timely accrual management ensures trade spend is properly booked, reducing financial surprises and improving forecast accuracy. Proactive deductions and claims management minimize revenue leakage, shorten recovery cycles, and improve cash flow.
Post-event analytics clearly identify which promotions drive incremental, profitable volume versus those that dilute margins. These insights allow brands to reinvest in high-performing promotions, eliminate low-ROI programs, and continuously optimize future trade strategies.
As a result, trade spend shifts from a reactive cost center to a predictable, measurable growth driver.
Because insights are only as strong as the data behind them, EA ensures accruals, deductions, and settlement data are accurate and audit-ready, so every decision is based on reliable, trusted numbers.
Companies can prevent losses by tracking deductions closely, ensuring proper documentation, and implementing robust processes for reconciling trade promotion expenses. Proactive monitoring can prevent revenue loss and strengthen financial control.
Precise accrual calculations reduce over- or under-booking and improve financial reporting. EA’s trade promotion management experts accurately calculate monthly trade promotion costs.
Successful Trade Promotion Management (TPM) requires seamless collaboration between sales, finance, and deductions teams. But too often, cross-functional teams operate in silos, focusing only on their specific responsibilities, leading to costly inefficiencies.
Take this common scenario:
- The sales team develops promotion plans using tools like Blacksmith or Microsoft Excel but doesn’t fully consider how accounting will process them.
- The accounting team prepares accruals without ensuring enough funds are allocated for the deduction team to clear retailer chargebacks.
- The deduction team is left scrambling when unexpected shortfalls arise.
When these teams fail to align, the result is a disjointed process, financial misalignment, and profit leakage. That’s why an integrated approach to TPM is critical, ensuring every department sees the full picture and works together efficiently.
Trade promotion software helps track promotions, manage accruals, and analyze performance. However, software alone won’t fix underlying process gaps or misalignment between teams.
Trade promotion management software can’t solve on its own because of the following reasons:
- Lack of cross-functional collaboration – Sales, finance, and deductions teams must align their processes, or inefficiencies will persist.
- Poor data management – If the data going into the system is inaccurate or incomplete, the software’s insights will be unreliable.
- Retailer chargeback complexities – Many deductions come with vague justifications that require human oversight to dispute effectively.
If trade promotion errors are ignored, companies can lose a lot of money. Retailers may charge back money for things like pricing issues or wrong promotions. If these errors aren’t checked and disputed quickly, they add up and can cost millions over time.
Read here to know more about how trade promotion management can cost companies millions.
Once the deductions pile up, it can be challenging to clear those deductions in a meaningful way because many companies lack the resources or trained personnel to investigate them thoroughly.
Even if you do have unlimited resources and an unlimited amount of money, identifying unauthorized deductions isn’t enough. Industry standards dictate that if a deduction isn’t disputed within 90 to 120 days, it becomes permanent.
As a result, by the time the problem surfaces, many organizations are left with no choice but to write off millions in lost revenue.
We take a structured, data-driven approach that ensures accuracy, compliance, and audit readiness, without overcomplicating the process.
Read more about the best practices we follow for managing trade promotion accruals here.
Yes. Our CPAs personally oversee the onboarding, review, and stabilization of all new clients.
Once your accounting is running smoothly, a dedicated engagement manager continues managing the day-to-day communication while our CPAs remain available for escalation, strategic questions, and periodic reviews.
Our clients’ accounts are managed by senior accountants typically with Big Four experience (e.g., Deloitte, EY) and reviewed by U.S.-based leadership.
Our hybrid model gives you the benefit of:
- Specialized U.S industry skill sets
- Big Four–caliber talent
- A heavily supervised team
- 60%+ cost savings
Quality control is strict, and oversight happens at multiple levels.
EA’s outsourced bookkeepers ensure smooth communication and collaboration with onshore teams across different time zones in the following ways:
- Schedules meetings: We ensure regular MS Teams or Zoom sessions at mutually convenient times to ensure consistent communication.
- We utilize email threads and MS Teams for asynchronous communication, enabling ongoing discussions where both parties can respond at their convenience.
- Meeting recaps: After each Google Meet or Zoom session, we send detailed summaries via email to keep everyone aligned and informed.