How does Salitix add value to your data?

At Salitix we have two very different, but complementary skill sets. On the one hand, we have an experienced team of commercial auditors who have years of experience analysing and reconciling every kind of financial transaction that takes place between grocery retailers and their suppliers every day. This experience allows Salitix to recognise when an agreement has not worked as intended, or when an error may have occurred that needs further examination or challenge.

On the other hand, we have a team of experienced data analysts, technicians and computer scientists who not only understand what data is generated between our clients and their customers, the retailers, but how it is processed, saved and stored within both legacy and modern ERP systems. Given the sophistication and ability of many of our clients accounting functions, I’m often challenged to explain what exactly Salitix can add when it comes to understanding their data, or finding something in it that they might not have done?

It’s a good question and it allows me to illustrate the difference between a business operating in real time and focused on a prospective trading position, versus how a commercial auditor might want to look at historic data retrospectively.

A supplier essentially wants flexibility from its accounting system to be able to create the numerous management reports generated therewith. For example, it might need to match quantities and volumes quickly and/or track movements of stock easily, to ensure availability of a popular line when it’s on promotion. Data fields tend to be quite open with complex narrative, or text strings, where sophisticated searches can be conducted within those text strings, quickly. Crucially, these systems are only analysing and processing a supplier’s own data, not that of their customers.

Conversely, Salitix will self-extract or be provided with data from both Supplier ERP systems and Customer systems – data that can appear unrelated. Salitix have bespoke routines to automatically capture specific insights from these different data sets, creating efficiencies not available to our customer. For example, one of the major outputs from the data we process is the creation of Promotional Schedules – which incorporate EPOS, Sales Invoice and Promotional data. These Promotional Schedules will show Actual funding vs Expected funding, which can then be used to identify potential errors, quickly. Similarly, we are experts in ‘scrubbing’ data, i.e., identifying a single piece of information (like an invoice number) from a complex text string, which can in turn be used to link data from disparate (unrelated) datasets. Then, because we are processing and collating a variety of datasets over long time periods, this also enables us to see trends over time, which in turn becomes a powerful analytical tool available to our auditors that can enable them to spot issues that might otherwise not be visible to the person responsible for tomorrows deal.

Salitix effectively build unique data sets from sources that our supplier clients would not necessarily need, or want to link to achieve their primary goal of successfully growing their prospective business volumes with their customers. This is why we can and do develop different insights, over different time-frames – from our customers, to the data associated with their commercial trading. Insights which add unique supplier value to the retrospective reconciliations that Grocery Retailers conduct as a matter of course.

At Salitix, we specialize in how to look back and aggregate very specific data-sets for analysis and reconciliation, quickly and efficiently.

Is it worth it?

Yes, because our customer gets a reconciliation they cannot easily perform, using our time, IP and specialist skill-sets built up over 30 years of retrospective auditing and they only pay for it, once they have received a significant financial benefit from it. Sound like an obvious win?

If yes, then please get in touch to see how we can transform your data and maximise its value to your business.