Signs Your Billback Management is Stuck in the ‘90s

We get it; the wine & spirits industry has been around for a long, long time. Nobody gets into this business for their love of spreadsheets, nor do we tend to excel (see what I did there?) in the technology department when compared with, well – most other industries. 

 

If your winery or distillery is still managing your billbacks the same way you did in the late 20th Century, AD, you’re not alone. As Dr. Gabor Mate, M.D., demonstrates in The Myth of Normal, however, “normal” does not always mean “good.”

 

It’s no secret that turning the corner into 2025 left our inboxes and social feeds riddled with doom and gloom in the headlines. Beverage alcohol brands are cutting costs left and right, LinkedIn profiles sporting the #opentowork badge are all too commonplace, and morale is low for many. We need clever ideas for cutting costs and saving money without turning to drastic measures. If there was ever time for adaptation — adopting new strategies and tools to save money — this is it. 

 

This article was written to sell you a TPM solution called Tradeparency, and its AI Invoice Manager tool in particular. It’s no use pretending otherwise; you’re too clever, and the need is too dire. With that in mind, here are common billback management strategies that you might still be practicing – unnecessarily, and at the expense of your bottom line. 

 

You keep all of your deals in spreadsheets.

Spreadsheets served us all well for a solid 35-40 years. That’s a pretty good run for glorified graph paper. They allowed us to work unbelievable magic for what they were. 

 

It’s also true that spreadsheets still do everything one needs them to do, the same way that papyrus and quill is still technically a workable medium for Christmas cards or letters from a love interest in Cairo. That doesn’t mean you’ll catch Penguin Random House or HarperCollins printing what little remains of their paperback business on it anytime soon. 

 

When real-time collaboration like Google Sheets came into play, things got even better, but many wineries and distilleries neglect even this capability. Most are pretty good about sharing documents internally, using cloud based services like Dropbox or Google Drive to house the brand’s digital assets. Sharing documents outside the organization, however, is where the wheels fall off with alarming velocity.

 

FOBs by state from the distributor? Sounds simple enough! Oh, you mean you have more than one distributor? And they all format things differently? Alright, we can work with that. Oh? And the price of each individual SKU changes faster than Gen-Z slang? And the prices are all outdated, last updated by someone who no longer works for the company? And you don’t remember the password to the password protected document? 

 

Call it trust issues, call it decentralized command – the odds of real-time collaboration across organizations spanning the 3 tier system occurring in a single shared spreadsheet are quite unfavorable, to put it gently. Those documents propagate like rabbits, not counting the 7 or 8 tabs (many of which are redundant) they each seem to spawn.

 

You Don’t Have a Way to Check Invoices for Errors

Especially if you’re reliant on spreadsheets, it’s easy to understand how someone could very quickly get into a position where they don’t keep historical records of their deals to refer back to. When the original pricing data is so unreliable and difficult to trust in the first place, it’s impossible to suggest corrections to the charges on a distributor invoice with any authority. That kind of vigilance requires awareness of the deals agreed upon in the first place.

 

Many wineries are not even aware they’re being overcharged. It’s not intentional, or a function of dishonesty or malice on the distributor’s part; where there’s human calculation, there’s bound to be errors. The burden is on you, the supplier, to ensure that you’re being charged the correct amount (or forever hold your peace).

 

You’re Paying Someone With a Degree in Finance to Enter Invoice Data and Check for Accuracy

While the pursuit of a post-graduate degree to become a barista or work the drive-thru is nothing new, that doesn’t mean your winery or distillery should follow suit by hiring talented individuals only to leverage approximately zero of their rare and valuable skills.

 

When times are tough, each of us needs to guard our team’s time like a Rottweiler. Paying high-value employees to do something AI can do faster and better is costly and absurd. 

 

Nobody goes to college to learn how to play “one of these things is not like the other,” but that’s exactly what’s being asked when our employees match the charges in a distributor invoice to historical deals in your system (assuming you have a system at all).

 

Instead, consider freeing their time to lend their expertise in big-picture, strategic conversations. How should we price SKU x or y? In looking at all of our trade promotions, which ones resulted in the most lift? Should we spend that money again, or reallocate? 

 

It Doesn’t Have to Be This Way: Introducing AI Invoice Manager

Remember your first job in wine & spirits? I do. Stammering something like “W-what do you mean we don’t know how much our own product costs?” was just the beginning of my faith in humanity unraveling before my very eyes. Melodrama aside, it really came as a shock that the fundamentals of commerce could be so spectacularly obfuscated. How the H-E-double-hockey-sticks does anyone sell this stuff?

Tradeparency keeps all of your deals, trade pricing and planning managed in one place so that sales and finance are always on the same page. It allows wineries and distilleries to determine which trade promotions are working – “should I keep this BTG placement?” – and which ones to discontinue. 

If you don’t have 100% confidence that all of your distributor deals have been paid accurately, this is some of the lowest hanging fruit available for cutting costs in 2025. Tradeparency’s new AI Invoice Manager:

• Extracts data from invoices, automatically recognizes each line item
• Auto-enters invoice data –  saves your highly skilled talent from the pain of manually copying everything over.
• Matches data to deals and uses machine learning to become better at recognizing various formatting permutations unique to each of your distributors

In a nutshell, AI Invoice Manager checks every single distributor invoice for accuracy against all of your existing deals in the system and alerts you to any discrepancies. Those dollars add up over time.

Most users leveraging Tradeparency see enough ROI within months of using the AI Invoice Manager to more than cover the cost of the investment. 

If you’d like to learn more, simply email me at dan.salisbury@andavisolutions.com and join the pack of happy suppliers who’ve left the spreadsheet life behind and never looked back.