Scheme leakage, and why discounts need an order

Ask a trade marketing manager where the scheme budget went and the honest answer is that they are not sure. The scheme was announced. The reps were told. The distributors were told. And at the end of the month the discount given was larger than the discount planned, spread across a thousand invoices, with no single place where it went wrong.

How leakage happens

• Two schemes overlap and a rep applies both, because nothing says which comes first.
• A distributor carries an old price list for a week after the change.
• A manual discount is typed on top of a scheme discount, because the customer asked and the rep had the field to type in.
• Free goods are given but not recorded as scheme stock, so they show as ordinary sales at zero value, or do not show at all.

Give the discount an order

In Targets discounts apply in a fixed sequence, the same on every phone and in the portal. Item and group schemes first. Then trade activation tiers. Then customer-specific discounts. Then order-value slabs. Only after all four does a manual discount apply, and only within the ceiling set for that user, by percentage and by value.

Free goods are selected at booking from the scheme and tracked separately from paid stock, so the cost of the scheme is a number you can read, not a guess.

Let distributors differ, on purpose

A distributor can carry its own prices and schemes over the national chart, but it is a deliberate override recorded in the system, not a stale price list on someone's laptop. Price and discount changes wait for approval and the approver is notified by email, so a change goes live when the right person says so, everywhere at once.

What you can then measure

Scheme cost per distributor, per SKU and per rep. Manual discount given against the ceiling. Free goods issued against orders. None of this needs a new report; it falls out of applying the discount in order. That is usually the point at which the trade marketing manager stops asking where the budget went and starts deciding where it should go.