The easy way to maximize rebate profits

What is a special pricing agreement (SPA), and why is it so hard to manage?

A special pricing agreement is a deal where a vendor agrees to a lower cost on specific products for a specific customer. You sell at the lower price and claim the difference between your standard cost and the SPA cost back from the vendor after the sale. Depending on your industry it goes by ship and debit, claim back, bill back, or chargeback. The math is simple. The volume is not. Agreements arrive as PDFs, spreadsheets, and portal downloads, each one has to be in your ERP before the first order ships, and every vendor wants claims in its own format. Band is SPA management software built for this: it reads the agreement, loads it into your pricing, and generates the claim in the vendor's format.

How does Band load SPAs into Epicor Eclipse, Prophet 21, or our ERP?

Band ingests the agreement in whatever form it arrives (PDF, Excel, CSV, HTML, or a portal export), maps vendor part numbers to your items, and pushes the pricing into your ERP. For Epicor Eclipse that means price matrices and contract customers at the item or price group level. For Prophet 21 it means price libraries and contracts. We also work with Infor CSD, SAP, NetSuite, Dynamics 365, and homegrown systems through an API or scheduled flat files. Before anything goes live you see a side-by-side comparison of current cost, SPA cost, and margin impact, and an agreement that used to take an hour to key in loads in 30 to 60 seconds.

Can Band automate our ship and debit claims and claim backs?

Yes. Band calculates claims from your actual sales transactions against each agreement's terms, builds the claim file in the vendor's required template (their SKU format, costing method, and calculation rules included), and sends it on the schedule that vendor expects, whether weekly, monthly, or quarterly, by email, EDI, FTP, or portal upload. It also flags transactions that were sold at SPA pricing but never claimed, which is where most distributors find money they didn't know they were missing. Every claim is tracked from submission through payment, so you can see what was paid, what came back short or rejected, and what is still open with each vendor.

How do we know we are collecting the vendor rebates we have earned?

Most distributors take the vendor's word for it, because rebate statements arrive as a summary with little detail behind the number. Band is vendor rebate tracking software that calculates what you have earned from your own purchase data, program by program and tier by tier, and compares it with what the vendor reports and pays. Differences surface at the transaction level, so you go back to the vendor with specifics rather than a hunch. You also see tier progress and a year-end forecast all year long, which turns a tier you are about to miss into a purchasing decision in October instead of a surprise in January.

How long does implementation take, and how much IT time does it need?

Your Band instance is ready the day you sign. From there the pace is set by data, not software. We need read access to your ERP transactions through an API or a scheduled flat file, plus your current agreements, and most IT teams provide that in a few hours of work. Band handles the mapping of vendor part numbers and categories to your items and maintains the platform after go-live, so there is no ongoing IT burden beyond user management. Most customers are processing their first agreements and claims within the first few weeks. Bringing every vendor program on board takes longer, and depends on how many programs you have and how quickly each vendor provides its data.

Is our pricing and rebate data secure, and who can see it?

Band has completed an independent SOC 2 Type II examination. Each customer runs in its own private instance hosted in the United States, your data is never pooled with another company's, and it is never shared with your vendors or anyone else. Role-based access controls who inside your company sees pricing, rebate, and margin data, and every change is logged for audit. We have completed enterprise security reviews and internal audit questionnaires for national distributors, and we share our SOC 2 report and written security policies during evaluation.