Deduction guides, indexed by the question they answer
What is here
These are the long-form guides behind our deduction work, indexed by the question each one answers rather than by title. Find your question in the table below and go straight to the guide that settles it.
What the guides answer, and where
The headline question each one settles
What is retailer deduction recovery?
It is the process of disputing and reclaiming money a retailer withheld from a supplier's invoice. The retailer short-pays and cites a reason code alleging a compliance failure, such as a shortage, a late or incomplete shipment, a packing or labeling error, or a pricing discrepancy. Some of those claims are valid and some are not. Recovery means identifying the invalid ones and disputing them with documentary evidence, inside the retailer's dispute window and in the retailer's required format.
Written for: Someone at a wholesaler, manufacturer, or distributor who ships physical goods to retailers and watches money disappear off their remittances.
Is a recovery agency or software better for retailer deductions?
Neither is better in general. There are four ways to handle retailer deductions, and each is the right answer for some suppliers: absorb them, hire in-house, engage a recovery agency, or run software or an agent. The real difference is not price. It is where the evidence comes from, and how much of your own operation you are willing to own.
Written for: A finance leader choosing an approach, including one for whom an agency is the better answer. The guide argues the agency case honestly and names the situations where ROIAI One is the wrong choice.
Read: Retailer Deductions: Software, Agency, In-House, or Absorb
Is Roy replacing my deduction analyst?
No. Roy does the working half of a deduction case: opening it, reading and normalizing the retailer's reason code, pulling the evidence, testing the claim against that evidence, working out the root cause, and assembling the dispute packet. Your analyst keeps the judgment half: whether a deduction is genuinely valid, what the retailer relationship can bear, which upstream process to fix, and which reason codes are trusted enough to submit without a look. This is a division of labour, not a replacement.
Written for: A team evaluating the working arrangement rather than the decision: who does which step of a case, and what stays with the analyst you already employ.
Read: A Digital Employee for Retailer Deductions, and What Your Analyst Still Owns
When is pursuing a deduction not worth the cost?
Write off a deduction when the fully loaded cost of pursuing it exceeds the value at stake, when the deduction is valid, when the evidence that would settle it cannot be obtained at a reasonable cost, or when the retailer's dispute window has closed. Keep pursuing it when you can reach the document that contradicts the claim, when the window is open, and above all when the same claim keeps recurring. The decision that matters most is not whether to close the AR line. It is whether closing it means you have also agreed to keep paying the same claim next month.
Written for: A deductions or AR manager who needs written criteria rather than a case-by-case judgement call, and a finance leader who has to make the resulting policy defensible.
Read: When to Write Off a Deduction and When to Keep Pursuing It
What happens to a retailer deduction when you have factored the receivable?
When you factor a receivable and the retailer then short-pays that invoice, the invoice does not settle as expected, and the shortfall has to land somewhere. Where your agreement gives the factor recourse for that shortfall, it lands back on the vendor. Recourse and non-recourse settle less of this than vendors expect, because non-recourse protection is written around the customer's credit risk, and a deduction is not a credit event, it is a dispute about the amount owed. The vendor holds the evidence and owns the operational root cause either way, while the cash now moves through the factor.
Written for: A vendor who has sold the receivable and needs to know who absorbs the shortfall, who can still dispute it, and which provisions of their own factoring agreement decide both.
Which retailer chargebacks are hardest to prove?
A retailer chargeback is hard to prove not because the retailer's claim is strong, but because of where the decisive evidence sits and who controls it. Sort your deduction book by custody of evidence, not by claim type, and the difficulty ranking falls out immediately: claims you can settle from documents you already hold are easy, claims whose decisive document is held by a carrier, a warehouse, a broker, or the retailer itself are hard, and claims whose decisive document was never created at all are the hardest of the three. Each of these is winnable. What makes it winnable is almost never cleverness at dispute time. It is whether the document existed, and whether you held it, before there was a dispute.
Written for: Someone deciding which of the claims in front of them are actually contestable, and what to start capturing now so the next one is.
Read: Which Retailer Chargebacks Are Hardest to Prove, and Why
The guides argue. The libraries look things up.
A guide answers a question you have to think about. If instead you need a specific fact, the reference libraries are the faster route: the deduction code library for what an individual reason code means and whether it is disputable, and the retailer intelligence library for the submission channel, required evidence, and reason-code taxonomy at a specific retailer.
If the question is about us rather than about deductions, the platform pages describe what Roy is and how it connects to your systems, the solutions pages route by the problem you are seeing, and the deduction knowledge hub collects all of it in one place.
Or skip the reading and use your own numbers
Every one of these guides ends in the same place: what your own deduction history actually says. You can start there instead.