Routine transactions between suppliers and retailers are often the product of carefully negotiated agreements that address shifting margins based on sales, returns, and other factors, including disparate tariffs from one country—or one product—to another.
Read also: Supplier Diversification, AI Readiness, and Circularity Top Supply Chain Priorities for 2025
For suppliers now dealing with ever-changing tariffs, however, there is an increased focus on making every dollar work as effectively as possible.
To counter the potential negative impacts, including supply disruptions or tariff-driven changes to the supplier-retailer relationship, many companies are looking to amend their sourcing strategies. And to maintain their ability to meet delivery obligations, suppliers may need to evaluate risk baselines, renegotiate contracts to account for tariff-related cost increases, and engage in collaborative planning to address mutual challenges caused by tariffs.
While both retailers and suppliers recognize the importance of maintaining the supplier’s viability, all too often suppliers short-change themselves by failing to collect every dollar they are owed under these agreements.
And, at a time when there is a hyper-focus on profit and loss, retail suppliers often look to third parties to identify those stranded assets.
Just as brands rely on accounting firms to minimize their tax liability, many today look for help in tracking the intricacies of their own retailer-supplier agreements to capture every dollar to which they are entitled.
Dallas Counts, Chief Operations Officer at Vendormint, explained to me that supplier agreements include various off-invoice allowances as well as certain compliance and regulatory stipulations by which the retailer can verify that the supplier is working efficiently.
All too often, though, off-invoice deductions or accounts receivable fines do not automatically accrue to the supplier, leaving large sums in limbo and unavailable for working capital.
Deductions and chargebacks can add up to 3% to 8% of the supplier’s revenue—or between 10% and 30% of their margin—so it’s potentially a lot of money.
Vendormint’s job, Counts says, is to help suppliers get that money out of limbo before the timeframe expires for reclaiming the funds.
Counts, who spent 15 years at Walmart mostly as a buyer, partnered with former Fulfillment by Amazon e-commerce seller Max Borin, who had earlier built a platform to help tens of thousands of small, mid-sized, and large businesses recover money in lost and damaged inventory.
Borin went on to found Vendormint to help suppliers recover money from brick-and-mortar retailers and ensure a level playing field that fosters long-lasting relationships, benefiting both parties in the process.
Counts says he is merely following in step with the leadership emblemized by his mentor, Sam Walton, to make sure all dollars in the supply chain are properly accounted for, so they can be most effectively used—whether in cost reduction, innovation, analytics, or retail media.
Suppliers today may have to relocate manufacturing to escape untenable tariffs that would make their goods uncompetitive. Ultimately, in such turbulent times, liquidity is paramount, and unrecovered cash harms liquidity.
Vendormint begins a relationship with the supplier with a free audit of accounts receivable, accounts payable, fines, and deductions, so as to ascertain whether there is unclaimed money that belongs to the supplier. Unlike other firms that charge a flat fee, Vendormint works on a commission basis with clients to incentivize finding every dollar owed.
Borin says that deductions and fines are valid if the supplier violated a policy in the agreement. At other times, those fines and deductions are invalid, and the retailer owes the money to the supplier. The nuances in these agreements are so hyper-complex that it may take some digging to determine rightful ownership of disputed (or otherwise unnoticed) amounts—and there is a critical window after which suppliers cannot recover those funds.
Another aspect of Vendormint’s work is helping suppliers understand how to eliminate valid deductions and avoid spending time and money on recovery down the road. Vendormint can currently assist suppliers in this light in working with 53 major retailers, including Walmart, Target, Costco, Home Depot, etc., and the list of retailers that they can support continues to grow.
For example, says Counts, one client had been billing incorrectly and incurring a lot of needless deductions, leaving millions of dollars floating for 30 days until the retailer reconciled the matter.
Other clients are potentially shipping incorrectly—on the wrong pallet, with an incorrect label, or causing other avoidable errors that result in fines.
Another concern is short-shipping, which enables the retailer to take deductions, and overshipping, for which retailers often fail to issue a payback. Counts says there are a lot of different avenues through which money can end up stuck (or lost), depending on the policies in the retailer-supplier agreement.
The suppliers’ responsibility is further complicated because each of, say, 50 retailers with whom they do business has different quirks in their agreements that may not be noticed by the individuals handling shipping and billing.
The experts at Vendormint are ultimately able to comb through each agreement to uncover unforced errors that are costing suppliers money.
Without this technical support, a supplier would have to work across multiple companies to recover funds and understand and improve their compliance ratings with each retailer. Building an in-house team to do all this work would also be far more expensive and less consistent than working with a firm whose entire business is revenue recovery.
Borin says that the current focus on shifting tariffs has heightened suppliers’ focus on profit/loss and ensuring that every dollar works as effectively as possible. This makes Vendormint’s work even more important—whether the supplier intends to use the recovered funds to combat a tariff or just to improve relationships with the retailers they supply by freeing up more funds for reinvestment.
In years gone by, retailers typically asked suppliers to provide goods at the lowest cost, but today it is the lowest cost plus an investment in the retailer’s analytics, retail media networks, and even seasonal rollbacks or other special pricing actions.
In this brave new world, where suppliers are expected to support as well as just sell to retailers, it is even more imperative for suppliers not to lose cash through retailer deductions.
