You Already Bought the Tool. Somebody Still Has to Run the Process.
Schemes, deductions, rebates, ship-and-debit and secondary sales — worked to a decision, every partner, every month. We do not sell you another trade promotion system. We run the operation around the one you already own.
None of These Are Selling Problems
Channel money leaks in six predictable places, and all six have the same root cause. The promise lives in a PDF circular. The evidence sits in somebody else’s system. The match is an analyst with a spreadsheet and ninety seconds. These are data problems wearing a sales badge - which is why a sales tool has never fixed them.
Six Leaks, One Root Cause
Schemes and Programmes
Designed in a spreadsheet, published as a PDF, claimed on a scan, settled by argument. The liability is a month-end guess.
Retailer Deductions
Money taken off the invoice. Most brands recover less than half, because the evidence is hard to assemble in the time an analyst has.
Invisible Sell-Out
You know what you shipped. You do not know what the channel sold. Every target and every accrual rests on that gap.
Rebates and Special Pricing
Earned but not collected. Ship-and-debit and special pricing agreements settled on the counterparty’s arithmetic rather than yours.
Under-Claim
Entitlement that quietly expires. Every vendor recovers what was taken from you. None computes what you never claimed.
Channel Stock
Stock in trade is a guess, so returns, price protection and expiry claims arrive as surprises rather than as forecasts.
What the Market Says It Is Costing
Three dated, named studies. None of them ours, and we have flagged the caveat on each.
60%
of brands recover less than half of what they dispute.
UpClear, CPG Deduction Practices Benchmark Report 2026, published 27 March 2026. Mid-market CPG cohort; sample size not published.
52%
of distributors believe they do not receive all the rebates they earn.
Enable, State of Volume Rebates, published 15 December 2023, across 13 sectors. Vendor-commissioned.
28%
track rebate performance in a spreadsheet — and a further 26% do not know how it is tracked.
Enable, State of Volume Rebates, published 15 December 2023. Vendor-commissioned.
The first number is the one that matters. Sixty per cent is a recovery rate for brands that have already bought the tools.
So Why Did the Software Not Fix It?
Because the tool starts where the problem has already happened.
That you know what was promised
It reads the claim. It cannot read the circular the claim is arguing about, because that circular is a PDF sitting in an inbox.
That you have the evidence
Proving a deduction is invalid needs the purchase order, the proof of delivery, the invoice and the scheme — four systems, and some of them are the retailer’s.
That somebody works the queue
Below a value threshold nothing is ever disputed. That threshold is a permanent margin loss nobody has costed.
The category’s own benchmark says so. UpClear’s 2026 report concludes that process must precede technology — and that is the whole of our argument.
Three Steps, and You Can Stop After the First
Each one is scoped and priced on its own. Nothing here needs a board paper to start.
The Trade Promotion Audit
We score ten domains of your channel money process from one to five — against your actual fields, documents and claim history, not a workshop. You get a scored report, a costed gap list and a phase-one scope. You own the output whether or not you do anything else with us.
Fix the floor
Only what scored one or two becomes build work, scoped and priced after you have seen the audit. Scheme terms as data. Sell-out ingestion. Claim intake with the evidence packet assembled on arrival. The matching engine. The accrual. We build the machinery; the record stays yours.
Feed, claim, settle
Feed — your scheme terms and channel data stay true as they change. Claim — every claim and deduction worked to a decision inside its window, every partner, not just the big two. Settle — accrual computed per invoice line, on a published date, with a calculation your partner can check.
Quarterly, you chair a review of what the money actually bought.
One Record Holds It Together
We call it the Trail, and it lives on your infrastructure rather than ours. The audit creates it, the monthly rhythm keeps it true, and every claim and settlement is worked against it.
The Promise
Every programme as data: terms, eligibility, caps, stacking rules, effective dates, and a named owner.
The Evidence
What the channel actually sold and holds, and every document that arrived with a claim attached to it.
The Match
What was owed against what happened - including what you were owed and never claimed.
The Settlement
What was paid, when, and the working behind it - visible to the partner who received it.
No Trail, no claim. You cannot argue a deduction you cannot evidence, and you cannot evidence it in the ninety seconds an analyst has. The Trail is what turns a dispute from an argument into a document.
What the First Six Weeks Look Like
Fixed scope, fixed price, and a number at the end you can act on.
The score is capped by its foundations. A best-in-class dispute desk sitting on scheme terms that live in PDFs does not score four. It scores two, because it is arguing from evidence it cannot produce.
Book a Trade Promotion AuditSystems We Work Alongside
We are never the vendor being replaced. Whatever you have bought to manage trade promotion, claims, rebates or pricing, the process underneath it is the same — and that is the part we run. These are the classes of system our teams work alongside every day.
Pick one leak.
We will scope a six-week measurement against it, at a fixed price, and you keep the output either way.
Scope the MeasurementWhy Iksula
Four reasons, and one of them is a limitation we would rather state up front.
We Already Do the Hard Part
Catalogue, product content, master data and commerce operations at scale, for named clients, every day. Channel money is the same discipline pointed at a different document.
We Are Never the Vendor Being Replaced
We run the process around whatever you already own. That makes us additive to money you have already spent, rather than another migration.
We Run It, Not Just Build It
Claim desks and data desks run monthly, on offshore economics that work at your size — deliberately beneath the deal floor of the large integrators.
We Will Tell You What We Cannot Claim
This is a new offer. We have no client outcome to quote on it yet, and we will not borrow one from elsewhere in our business. What we can show you is the method and the people.
What This Works With
Trade Promotion Operations does not stand on its own. It reads from work we already do, and it hands work back to it.
Governed Decision Layer
The governed data layer the Trail reports from, so a question outside its scope returns an error rather than a confident wrong number.
Athena Data Quality
Data quality and governance on the customer, product and price master that an entitlement rule has to read before it can compute anything.
Product Content & Catalogue Operations
The operations discipline this is built on. Channel money is the same work pointed at a different document.
Commerce Capability Center
For clients who would rather hold the claim desk on their own payroll than have us run it. We build it and hand it over.
Who Buys This
One economic buyer, one co-signature, and one person who lives with the result every month.
Chief Revenue Officer or VP Sales
Owns revenue, trade spend as a share of it, and the channel relationship. What keeps them up is a partner relationship that turns adversarial at every settlement, and a trade-spend number they cannot defend in the operating review.
Chief Financial Officer or Finance lead
Owns the accrual and the prior-period adjustments it causes. What keeps them up is a trade-spend true-up that lands every quarter, and a liability nobody can compute per invoice.
Head of Revenue Operations
Owns the desk, the analysts and the month-end. What keeps them up is ten days of every month consumed by retyping partner files, and a write-off threshold nobody has costed.
Where This Applies
Consumer Goods Selling Through Retail
Brands whose margin is decided by retailer deductions, trade funds and a sell-out picture they do not own.
B2B Distribution
Distributors settling rebates, ship-and-debit and special pricing agreements on the counterparty’s arithmetic.
Manufacturers With a Distributor Network
Manufacturers running schemes, slabs and growth programmes across hundreds or thousands of dealers.
The trigger is the same in all three: you run schemes, rebates, special pricing or co-op programmes that are settled from documents rather than from data.
What Has to Be True First
Almost nobody in this market publishes their prerequisites. These are ours, and if they are not in place we will say so during the audit rather than after the build.
- Your scheme and programme documents exist somewhere we can reach them — even if that somewhere is an inbox, a shared drive and a set of PDFs.
- You can give us a route to channel sell-out and channel stock data, or you accept that establishing one is part of the build.
- Portal access runs on sanctioned bot tokens issued to us. We do not work on shared credentials, ever.
- A named owner exists on your side for scheme terms. Without one, the promise stays a document and the match stays manual.
- Finance will accept a settlement posting in a form we agree before the build, not after it.
- The Trail sits on your infrastructure. That is a decision you make early, because every number we report is computed from it.
If the honest answer to the audit is that you should fix the scheme terms and stop there, that is what the report will say.
What We Measure, and What We Will Not Claim
The right-hand column is the one that matters. It is why the left-hand column can be trusted.
Reported from your record, not ours
- Recovery rate per trading partner.
- Dispute cycle time.
- Share of claims worked inside their window.
- Accrual-to-settlement variance.
- Under-claimed entitlement identified.
- Cost per dispute.
- Domain score movement between audits.
Because we cannot yet stand behind it
- A recovery percentage. Unproven for this service, and the loudest number in this market is a self-reported cumulative total.
- A savings percentage. It is table stakes in every pitch and unproven in most of them.
- A competitor’s market sizing. We have not seen the methodology behind the largest figures in circulation.
- Anything branded as automated pricing or price optimisation. That is a different business, with a different risk profile, and it is not ours.
- That we govern, assure, certify or guarantee recovery. We produce the working. We never attest.
Everyone in this category sells a tool. Nobody runs the process.
A category whose own benchmark concludes that process must precede technology has an unserved process layer. That layer is what we sell. We are tool-agnostic by design, we are never the vendor being replaced, and we score the process against your own fields and documents before we offer to run any of it.
We run product content and catalogue operations for Home Depot, SiteOne and Wayfair. Named, with their consent. Those are different engagements with different scopes, so we quote no numbers from them here.
And here is what we will not do
- We will not mark our own homework. The Trail sits on your infrastructure, and recovery rate and cycle time are computed from your record rather than from our report.
- We will not chair the review. You do, quarterly.
- We will not filter findings. Raw output is handed over untouched, including findings that reflect badly on work we did.
- We will not price the audit inside the run. It is bought separately so you can stop after it.
- We will not produce a payout from a model. Every scheme structure has one explicit formula, because a payout is a number your partner can dispute and your auditor will question.
60% of brands recover less than half of what they dispute.
Every one of them already owns the software.
Source: UpClear, CPG Deduction Practices Benchmark Report 2026, published 27 March 2026. Mid-market CPG cohort; sample size not published.
What This Looks Like in Practice
This is a new packaged offer, so there is no client outcome to show you yet. What we can describe is work that is in build right now, for a listed Indian cement manufacturer with around 2,500 direct dealers. The client is not named because we do not hold consent, and no result is quoted because the work has not finished.
Spreadsheets and email
A scheme approved over email, parameterised by region, tracked against SAP each period, then settled by hand across three separate teams.
One catalogue of schemes
Every scheme versioned and effective-dated. Budget checked when a scheme is defined, not discovered after it is spent. Approvals that follow a route and leave a record.
Ten tiers, twenty-three structures
From a simple slab to a rate read from a volume-by-growth matrix, per-truck-load rates set by wheeler type, and rolling windows that start from each dealer’s own joining date.
A statement a dealer can check
Credit notes posting to SAP in a form Finance accepts first time, and a settlement statement the dealer can read line by line, with every figure traceable to the transactions it came from.
The calculation engine is rule-based. The same inputs always produce the same figure, and no part of a payout is produced by a model.
Talk To Our Experts
DJ Basumatari
Chief Executive Officer
Abhishek Jain
Director - Solutions & Innovation
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Trade Promotion Operations?
Trade Promotion Operations is a managed service from Iksula that scores, fixes and then runs the process deciding what your channel is owed, proving it, settling it, and recovering what was wrongly taken. It covers schemes, retailer deductions, rebates, ship-and-debit, special pricing agreements, co-op and secondary sales. It is not trade promotion software, and it does not replace any system you already own.
We already bought a trade promotion tool. Why would we need Trade Promotion Operations?
Because the tool starts after the problem has happened. It reads a claim, but it cannot read the PDF circular the claim is arguing about, and it cannot assemble a purchase order, a proof of delivery and an invoice from four systems. UpClear’s 2026 benchmark found that 60% of brands still recover less than half of what they dispute, and those brands have tools installed. Iksula’s Trade Promotion Operations runs the process around the tool rather than replacing it.
Is Trade Promotion Operations just a BPO arrangement?
No. A BPO takes the process as it is and staffs it more cheaply. Iksula scores the process across ten domains first, fixes only what scores one or two, and only then runs it. The six-week audit is bought and priced separately, so you can stop after it and keep the output.
Who owns the data and the calculation in Trade Promotion Operations?
You do. The connecting record — we call it the Trail — sits on your infrastructure, not ours. It carries the promise, the evidence, the match and the settlement for every programme. Every figure we report, including our own performance, is computed from your record, and your partners can check the working behind any settlement.
What does the six-week Trade Promotion Audit actually produce?
A scored report across ten domains of your channel money process, rated one to five against your actual fields, documents and claim history rather than a workshop. A costed gap list, where every gap carries a number. And a ranked phase-one scope you can approve without a board paper. It is fixed scope and fixed price, and you own the output whether or not you engage us further.
Can Iksula show a client already running Trade Promotion Operations?
Not yet, and we will say so plainly rather than borrow a number from elsewhere. We are building a governed scheme and settlement system right now for a listed Indian cement manufacturer with around 2,500 dealers, covering ten beneficiary tiers and twenty-three scheme structures. That work is in build, so there is no outcome to quote. What we can show you is the method, the problem model and the people.
