For CFOs and Finance Leaders at Industrial Distributors

Recover 2-5% of gross margin. Board-defensible.

Most mid-market distributors leak 2-5% of gross margin to rep discounting, stale contracts, and vendor cost pass-through lag. We audit it in 48 hours, then run continuous controls that stop the leak, with every recovered dollar traceable to a specific transaction.

2-5%
GM recovered on total COGS base
48 hrs
To the board-ready audit
30-60 d
Payback on platform cost
15-25x
Year-one GP $ : opex ratio
Where Margin Actually Leaks

Four sources.
All four measurable.

The typical mid-market distributor is leaking 2-5% of gross margin through these four channels. The audit quantifies each one in dollars, with specific transactions behind every number.

~35%

Rep discretionary discounting

30-40% of margin leakage. Reps discount to close, defaults stick, and the floor drops. By quarter-end nobody remembers what the list price was supposed to do.

~28%

Stale contracts and agreements

25-30% of leakage. Multi-year contracts priced against last year's cost curve. Vendor raises 8%, your price holds, your GM shrinks. Nobody flags it because nobody reads contracts monthly.

~22%

Vendor cost pass-through lag

20-25% of leakage. Vendor updates land in the ERP, but sell prices don't move for weeks. Every day the spread compresses, and every order booked in that window is underwater.

~15%

Unoptimized promo and rebate activity

10-15% of leakage. Promos that stop producing lift but keep running. Rebate thresholds reps miss. Net pricing drifts below intended floor and takes a quarter to see.

The Math

Payback in
days, not quarters.

Assumes 2-5% GM leakage against revenue base, 60% recovery rate in year one (conservative, most distributors recover 70-80% once Quote Guard and Agreement Watch are live).

RevenueEstimated LeakageYear-One RecoveryPayback on $2,500/mo
$25M$500K-$1.25M annual leakage$300K-$500K recovered~35 days
$50M$1M-$2.5M annual leakage$750K-$1.25M recovered~18 days
$100M$2M-$5M annual leakage$1.5M-$2.5M recovered~9 days

Every recovered dollar is traceable to a specific transaction, rep, agreement, or promo, auditable back to the ERP.

Financial Controls

Not dashboards.
Controls.

Pricing analytics tells you what leaked. Controls prevent it from leaking in the first place. Four live controls, each with a full audit trail.

Quote Guard, pricing control at the quote

Every quote checked against contract, tier, matrix, and current cost. Out-of-policy discounts flagged before they leave the rep's screen. Full approval audit trail. No more finding out at month-end.

Agreement Watch, contract-to-cost monitoring

Every active agreement continuously monitored against vendor cost changes. When a pass-through is due, you get an alert with the dollar impact and the renegotiation target, not a quarterly surprise.

Promo Monitor, live lift tracking

Every promo measured in real time against baseline. When lift stops, you get a kill-or-extend recommendation with the actual numbers. Finance owns promo spend again.

Drift Detector, discount pattern audit

Rep-level, customer-level, SKU-level discounting trends with deviation alerts. Not surveillance theater, a documented audit trail of pricing discipline that stands up to a board review.

SOC 2 Type II · Read-only ERP integration · Segregation of duties enforced

The agent is layered on top of your ERP, not embedded inside it. No change to revenue recognition. No change to audit posture. Your auditor gets more evidence, not less.

CFO FAQ

The questions
your board will ask.

What does this hit in the P&L?

Gross margin, directly. Recovered leakage flows through COGS, no revenue recognition change, no new line items. Platform cost is opex and is typically dwarfed 15-25x by year-one GP captured.

How is this different from pricing analytics in our ERP?

Your ERP tells you what leaked last quarter. The agent catches it before it books. Inline at the quote, live against vendor cost updates, continuous monitoring on agreements. Dashboards are retrospective. Agents are preventive.

What about incumbents like Vendavo and Zilliant?

They sell enterprise pricing platforms, six-figure ACVs, 6-12 month implementations, dedicated pricing teams to operate. We're purpose-built for mid-market distributors: weeks to deploy, no pricing team required, no data-cleanup prerequisite.

Do we need clean pricing data first?

No. We ingest what you have, contracts in PDF, overrides in spreadsheets, price lists in the ERP, and normalize it during onboarding. The data cleanup is a byproduct of the deployment, not a prerequisite.

Does this touch financial controls or audit posture?

It strengthens both. Every approval, override, and exception generates an audit-ready log. Segregation of duties improves because the agent enforces policy before humans make exceptions. SOC 2 Type II.

How do I defend this at the board?

Before/after GM by customer segment, recovered $ by leakage source, approval exception rate, agreement compliance %. All traceable to specific transactions. Every claim is auditable back to the ERP.

What's the downside risk?

60-day paid pilot with clear GP $ targets. No long-term contract. If the agent isn't producing GP recovery above platform cost, you stop. Explicitly structured to make payback visible before any renewal decision.

What do we walk away with from the audit?

A board-ready one-pager: total margin leakage estimate, top 10 underwater agreements, rep discount benchmarks vs. peer distributors, and quick-win renegotiation targets with dollar amounts. Yours to keep regardless of whether you continue.

Start With the Audit

See the number first.
Decide after.

Audit Only

Free

48-hour margin audit. Read-only ERP integration. Full report: leakage estimate, underwater agreements, rep discount benchmarks, renegotiation targets.

Yours to keep. No commitment.

Book the Audit
Best ROI

Margin Intelligence

$2,500/month

Quote Guard, Agreement Watch, Promo Monitor, Drift Detector. Continuous monitoring, alerts, and audit trail. Monthly margin recovery review.

30-60 day payback at $20M+ revenue

Model Your Recovery

No setup fees · No long-term contracts · 60-day paid pilot on Margin Intelligence · Stop any time

Get the number.
Keep it either way.

48-hour read-only audit. Board-ready one-pager: total leakage estimate, top 10 underwater agreements, rep discount benchmarks, quick-win renegotiation targets with dollar amounts. Yours to keep regardless.

48-hour turnaround
Read-only · no commitment
SOC 2 Type II