FAQ
The questions buyers actually ask
Answers, not positioning. Where the honest answer is “it depends on your data”, that is what it says.
RevUpra basics
What the platform is, and who it is for.
What is RevUpra?
RevUpra is an AI-governed revenue and margin platform for manufacturers and distributors. It automates customer and vendor rebates, ship & debit and chargebacks, trade promotions, contract lifecycle with e-signature, price optimisation and usage-based billing across any ERP — accrued, claimed and settled to the general ledger, reconciled to the penny.
Who is RevUpra for?
Manufacturers and distributors running rebate, ship & debit and channel-incentive programmes on spreadsheets or ERP customisations. In practice the buyers are finance, sales operations, pricing and channel teams who need every entitlement captured, every claim validated and a clean month-close.
Is RevUpra a rebate tool or a pricing tool?
Both, deliberately. Rebates and pricing are the same margin problem seen from two ends: the price you set and the money that comes back off it. Treating them in separate systems is precisely why net pocket price is so hard to see. RevUpra holds the agreement, the price and the settlement on one ledger.
How long does implementation take?
Weeks rather than quarters for a first programme. An AI-assisted, first-principles methodology maps your programmes, data and edge cases up front, typically cutting rollout time by up to 60% against a legacy rebate implementation. Implementations run on a fixed budget with sprint-based delivery.
Rebates & incentives
Programme types, accrual and settlement.
What kinds of rebate programmes does RevUpra support?
Flat rate, tiered, volume, growth, retroactive and non-retroactive, lump-sum, mix-and-grow, and combinations of these on the same agreement. Both buy-side (vendor rebates you earn) and sell-side (customer rebates you fund), plus special pricing agreements, billing agreements and MDF or co-op programmes.
How does the accrual engine work?
Agreement terms are stored as executable rules, not documents. On a schedule, the engine evaluates qualifying transactions against those rules in-database, computes the accrual with exact decimal maths and posts it to the mapped GL accounts against a locked accounting period. Every posted number drills back to the transaction lines that produced it.
What is the difference between a proactive and a reactive accrual?
A proactive accrual books the expected rebate as the qualifying transaction happens, so the liability is always current. A reactive accrual books it after the fact — usually at period end from aggregated volume. Proactive is more accurate and far easier to audit; reactive is common where the source data only arrives monthly. RevUpra supports both.
Can it handle retroactive tier changes?
Yes. When a customer crosses a tier and the agreement is retroactive, the engine recalculates the earlier volume at the new rate and books the catch-up as an adjustment, with the reversal and the re-accrual both visible in the audit trail.
Ship & debit and chargebacks
The highest-volume, lowest-visibility part of most channel programmes.
Does RevUpra handle ship & debit and chargebacks?
Yes — it is a first-class module. Authorisations (also called SPAs, debits or claimbacks) are created and versioned; distributor POS and inventory files are ingested and normalised; every claim line is validated against its authorisation, price, window and entity; disputes are tracked; and settlement posts to the GL. It is built for high-volume channel programmes where line counts run to millions.
What is the difference between ship & debit, a chargeback and a claimback?
They are largely regional and industry synonyms for the same mechanism: a manufacturer authorises a distributor to sell a part to a named end customer below the distributor’s standard cost, and the distributor then bills back the difference. Semiconductor and electronics say ship & debit or debit authorisation; pharma and medical distribution say chargeback; some industrial sectors say claimback or SPA.
How do you stop paying invalid debit claims?
By validating at line level rather than sampling. Each submitted line is matched to a live authorisation for that part, that end customer, that price and that date window, using cross-referenced identifiers so partner part numbers and entity codes resolve to yours. Only exceptions reach a person, which is what makes 100% validation affordable.
Pricing & margin
Price optimisation, triangulation and leakage.
What is price triangulation?
Reconciling the three prices that exist for the same transaction: the invoice price, the contract or agreed price, and the net-net pocket price after every off-invoice deduction — rebates, debits, promotions, settlement terms and freight. In most businesses these three live in different systems, so nobody sees all of them at once. Triangulation resolves them into one number per line.
What is pocket price, and why does it matter more than list?
Pocket price is what you actually keep after every on- and off-invoice reduction. List price and even invoice price routinely overstate it by several points. Because incentives are paid long after the invoice, a deal can be approved as profitable and settle as a loss. Managing on pocket price is the single highest-leverage change most channel businesses can make.
Where does revenue leakage actually come from?
In our taxonomy there are nine repeatable sources: unclaimed entitlement, unvalidated channel claims, identifier mismatch, price erosion and discount stacking, accrual drift, promotion and MDF spend leakage, contract drift, deduction write-off, and reporting latency. Each has a financial cause and a systems cause, and each has a benchmark you can measure yourself against.
How much margin is typically recoverable?
Two to four percent of the revenue that passes through incentive programmes is a common recovery range once leakage is closed, though it depends heavily on channel depth, programme complexity and data quality. The honest answer for any specific business comes from a diagnostic against your own data, not from a benchmark.
Platform, data & AI
Integration, scale, security and how the AI is governed.
Which ERPs does RevUpra work with?
Any ERP. A configurable integration engine ingests transactions, channel sell-through and inventory in whatever format your systems emit, validates and normalises them against your master data, and writes settlements back. SAP, Oracle, Microsoft Dynamics, NetSuite, Infor and Epicor are common; homegrown systems are handled the same way.
How does RevUpra handle mismatched partner and product IDs?
A cross-reference engine maps partner identifiers, product and part numbers, and entity or ship-to hierarchies to your master records — including many-to-one and GPO-style codes. Anything that cannot be resolved is surfaced as an exception queue rather than silently dropped, which is the failure mode that makes leakage invisible.
Is the AI actually governed, or is it a chatbot?
Governed. Assistants and skill agents run scoped to the signed-in user’s data and permissions, under policy set at product, company and role level, with request and response guardrails. Anything flagged goes to a managed review queue, and every interaction is logged. The AI proposes; your policy decides.
What scale does the platform handle?
Feeds benchmarked at over two million rows, per-agreement calculation under fifteen milliseconds that stays flat as volume grows, and ingestion above twenty thousand transactions per second. Money is handled with exact decimal maths rather than floating point, accurate to $10 quadrillion, with complete data isolation between customers.
How is our data secured?
Multi-tenant isolation enforced at the database row level, RBAC plus attribute-based authorisation down to who may adjust, reverse and settle, SSO/OIDC and MFA, an encrypted vault for every integration credential, and an immutable audit trail with a job trace for every engine decision. A Sovereign edition provides a dedicated single-tenant private cloud with data-residency controls.
Buying & getting started
Editions, delivery model and what a demo covers.
How is RevUpra priced?
Three editions — Core, Premium and Sovereign — sized by the modules you run and the scale you run them at, with implementation on a fixed budget. Pricing is quoted after a scoping conversation because programme complexity, not user count, is what drives effort. See the editions page for what each one includes.
What happens in a demo?
Thirty minutes, tailored to your programmes. We walk an agreement through modelling, contracting, accrual, claim and settlement using examples close to your own, show the integration path from your ERP, and model an indicative ROI against your channel volumes. No obligation.
Can we start with one programme?
Yes, and we usually recommend it. Pick the programme with the most leakage or the most manual effort, get it live, prove the number, then extend. Because everything runs on one configurable engine, the second programme is configuration rather than a new project.
Do you replace our ERP?
No. RevUpra sits alongside the ERP and owns the incentive, contract and settlement layer that ERPs handle poorly. Transactions come in, settlements go back, and the GL stays authoritative.
Your question is not here?
Send it to us and we will answer it. Anything that comes up more than once gets added to this page.
See what RevUpra can recover for you.
Thirty minutes, tailored to your programmes. We walk an agreement through modelling, contracting, accrual, claim and settlement using examples close to your own — and model an indicative ROI against your volumes.