FAQ

Tradeparency is a full-cycle trade promotions management software that delivers total control and visibility of a winery’s product pricing. Tradeparency is the only trade spend management platform to address 100% market coverage across pricing, claims, analysis, approvals, and planning cycles.

Visit our product page to learn more about the Tradeparency solution.

A trade promotion management system centralizes and automates depletion allowance tracking, promotions planning, rebate programs, and billbacks processing, so three-tier wineries and importers can immediately replace their reliance on error-prone manual management and distributor pricing reconciliation that ultimately costs profits.

With Tradeparency is the only full-cycle trade promotion management solution available for the market and includes reporting, analytics, and interactive planning tools, so wineries can optimize their three-tier promotional programs and incentives to yield desired results in targeted markets.

Full-cycle refers to how Tradeparency uniquely covers pricing, claims processing, core financial system integration, complete market analysis, promotional model planning, and automated pricing approvals into a single, centralized software platform.

Visit the ‘Why Tradeparency’ page to learn more about how full-cycle pricing management can benefit your wine business.

Where other solutions on the market focus on pricing only, Tradeparency’s integrated and comprehensive combination of trade promotions management tools allow three-tier wineries and suppliers to finally track every single dollar in their distributor pricing programs. This includes incentives, samples, by-the-glass, and depletion allowances. In addition, friction between IT, sales, and finance teams is eliminated with Tradeparency’s centralized data and no need to chase outdated spreadsheets or handshake agreements.

Tradeparency is designed for wineries and importers, primarily in the United States, to govern, document, optimize, and automate the distributor promotional pricing component of the three-tier distribution system. Check out our entertaining introduction video: Why Do Three-Tier Wine Suppliers Need Tradeparency?

Tradeparency was established in January of 2018. The Tradeparency product and company were established by Business Impact, who has been in business since 2005. To learn more about Tradeparency and who we are, visit our about us page.

Tradeparency was built by the expert data artisans at Business Impact. They specialize in analytics, reporting, business intelligence, and data management for the wine and beverage, agricultural, cannabis, and process manufacturing industries.

Over the course of many years working with top wineries and importers, Doug Hoogervorst (Founder and President) and Andrew Ridling (Co-Founder and VP of Product Management) from the Business Impact team found a large gap in the ability of third-party depletion data to accurately reconcile the whole picture of trade spend, promotions, and distributor depletion allowances.

In their process of helping customers with their analytics and business visibility, they found that wineries were regularly spending tens of thousands, sometimes hundreds of thousands, to distributors in unwarranted chargebacks. As such, Tradeparency was born to automate the entire, full-cycle of trade spend promotion from pricing, to promotions planning, to reconciling billbacks against true invoices.

To check out Tradeparency in action, watch this 5-minute overview video.

Users of Tradeparency are most commonly top-level finance personnel like CFO’s and VP’s of Finance, finance managers, as well as business owners, sales managers, and IT teams. Additionally, Tradeparency is often leveraged by controllers or accounting administrators, who are looking for more accurate and efficient ways to perform their duties around spend tracking and depletion allowances. In addition, sales teams often rely on Tradeparency to boost results through their distributors and for managing national on-premise accounts.

Tradeparency provides a centralized, cloud-based pricing management solution to streamline working with supplier sales teams using fully integrated pricing and billback management tools. Using our cloud platform, sales leaders can easily manage all their pricing grids in one place. In a single interface, all distributor pricing is at their fingertips without requiring multiple spreadsheets and dozens of tabs. Adding new deals is as simple as a couple of clicks. Manually verifying against pricing grids is a thing of the past when a billback is received.

For more details, read our blog: How to Get Your Three-Tier Wine Pricing Strategy Right.

Tradeparency aligns distributor billbacks with approved pricing structures all in one place. There is no need to enter billbacks twice or use disparate spreadsheets to ensure compliance. Depletion allowances are stored in your Tradeparency cloud-based pricing grid and aligned directly with billbacks received from distributors. Depletion allowances can be approved in one view as opposed to clicking through a dozen spreadsheets to validate them and align with the billbacks. Since approved pricing grids are current, billback validation is fast, simple, and effective, so you never pay out unwarranted funds.

At Tradeparency, we understand that DAs are only a portion of the total selling expenses in distributor markets. Other expenses are equally important to understanding which market investments are most effective and which are not. For this reason, Tradeparency is built to track, manage, and plan more types of promotional deals than any other trade spend management solution. Along with DAs, Tradeparency handles all other expenses, such as samples, incentives, and more. In fact, Tradeparency is the only pricing solution to cover 100% of your promotional activity. Where planning for other promotions is usually handled manually outside of a system, Tradeparency allows you as a supplier to track these other “deals” just as they would depletion allowances in a centralized platform.

For more information, read our article: Tracking Success of the Top 5 Wine Sales Promotions: BTG, Quantity Discounts, Closeouts, Incentives, and Samples.

The data collected by Tradeparency can align with any chosen business intelligence solution for deep analysis on spending vs. depletions. For example, if you use Microsoft Power BI, Targit, or your own data warehouse platform, the Tradeparency team can help you configure and run accurate, powerful analysis on your trade spend, promotional programs, and pricing to turn the right dials to increase profitability and the distribution you are looking for. To learn more about our reporting features and function, contact us for a demo of Tradeparency analytics today.

Tradeparency offers two different ways to process billbacks; choosing AP invoices or AR Credit Memos. Tradeparency will format and provide the necessary information for automatic processing within a company’s native ERP solution. We will create a custom integration or flat-file export for entry in a supplier’s chosen ERP solution. No need for dual entry.

Tradeparency works directly with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, Dynamics NAV, NetSuite, SAP, QuickBooks, and more. Contact us to find out if and how your ERP integrates with Tradeparency.

Absolutely! To learn more about how Tradeparency helps you track your BTG programs, download our free whitepaper here: How Much Am I Spending on My Wine By-The-Glass (BTG) Program?.

Yes! Tradeparency absolutely has a huge advantage for distributors by removing the logjam of getting billbacks processed within the supplier network. When suppliers work with Tradeparency, the processing of billbacks is extremely organized and efficient. When billbacks are provided directly through Tradeparency from distributors, the process is streamlined with little effort required on the distributor’s part. Tradeparency will also work with distributors to provide approved pricing grids from the supplier, so there is no longer a need to manage multiple versions of excel based pricing grids.

Tradeparency is priced to scale with your depletion allowance and trade spend volume and will vary for every winery and importer. Contact us to get a personalized, transparent quote today.