Most manufacturers know their trade spend program has inefficiencies. What surprises them is where the money is leaking out. Dean Rallo and Drew Shields tackled this head-on in a recent iTradeNetwork Fireside Chat, and the answer is not what teams expect when they first start digging.

The Labor Problem Nobody Talks About

When manufacturers describe their current claims process, the first thing that comes up is time. Teams are processing claims manually, burning through labor hours just to get to a single outcome: clearing the claim and moving on. The goal becomes throughput, not accuracy.

That narrow focus is understandable under the circumstances. When the workload is heavy enough, keeping up feels like the only option. The problem is that a process built purely around claim clearance leaves a significant amount of value on the table, and most teams don't have the bandwidth to notice.

Double Dips Get the Headlines

Ask anyone managing trade spend about their biggest concern, and double dips come up immediately. Claims paid twice are visible, they're quantifiable, and they feel like an obvious win to recover. The industry has spent years focused on catching them, and rightfully so.

But double dips are only part of the story. Two other sources of revenue leakage tend to fly under the radar, and in many cases they're responsible for just as much financial exposure.

The Quiet Culprits: Rate Errors and Off-Contract Products

The first is rate validation. Every contract has agreed-upon rates, and when claims come in at the wrong rate, that gap represents direct revenue leakage. As Dean put it during the chat, "There's a lot of revenue leakage in that line item itself, and that's really hard to do manually. It doesn't work." Cross-referencing claim rates against contract terms across dozens of distributors and hundreds of SKUs requires either a dedicated team or a system built to do it automatically. Most manufacturers have neither, so incorrect rates get paid out consistently and quietly.

The second is product eligibility. Claims regularly include products that don't qualify under the contract. These items should be flagged against an exclusion list, but when claims are processed manually, that check rarely happens with any reliability. Products get forced through, and when nobody catches them in time, the payout goes out the door.

Neither of these issues is dramatic in isolation. But combined with rate errors and double dips across a full distributor network, the cumulative impact on margin can be substantial.

The Bigger Picture

Trade spend leakage isn't usually one large problem. It's several smaller ones running simultaneously, each one difficult to catch manually and easy to overlook when the priority is just keeping claims moving. A program built around visibility, contract validation, and eligibility checks changes what's possible.

iTradeNetwork's MarginIQ was built for this. By automating rate validation, flagging off-contract products, and surfacing duplicate claims before they're paid, MarginIQ gives manufacturers the controls their current process is missing without adding headcount to do it.

The conversation with Dean and Drew is worth watching in full. If you missed it, catch it here.

Want to know what that kind of visibility could mean for your margins? A personalized ROI assessment is a good place to start.