End-to-end claims defence by Salitix saves global beauty company millions

Our client is a global beauty company with a portfolio of brands across fragrance, colour, cosmetics, and skin and body care, boasting global revenues in excess of USD6.15bn. In the UK, its mass-market beauty brands are primarily sold in supermarkets, pharmacies, department stores, and e-commerce retailers.

They received a high volume of historic claims against commercial trading in these markets, which required a new strategy to help the company manage both the cost and time spent dealing with these claims.

Challenge: Minimise the cost of audit claims and mitigate their administration costs

Our client needed to get customer audit claims under control – removing them from their commercial dialogues, while providing more robust validation methodologies and recovering errors where they had overpaid, or paid in error.

Solution: A frictionless, managed trade spend review

They chose to engage Salitix to provide a trade spend reconciliation of their commercial activity with key clients to identify claims in their favour. They also wanted the Salitix team to implement a new claim defence way of working, whereby any audit claim received from a client was centrally managed and Salitix executed all negotiation and correspondence with the client. This strategy recognised that the best way to mitigate client audit claims was to implement their own prima facie reconciliation of trade spend to identify all errors and therefore enable a more robust defence of the claims made.

Results: A significant reduction in value of claims paid and administration costs incurred, while recovering monies due back to our client

“In a nutshell, we pay significantly less in audit claims and what we do is largely offset by what we recover, while I have to dedicate almost no time to the process.”

Senior Sales Finance Manager, global beauty company

Cash benefits delivered since the inception of the new process in 2019 are in the millions, while internal investment by finance managers has reduced significantly as Salitix manage the end-to-end process with little or no requirement for client input. Additional benefits include learnings for our client’s commercial teams into how their customers account for certain promotional mechanics and why this can lead to funding payments made in error.