What should I ask my distributor for each month?
The short answer: Ask for account-level depletions for your products: account ID, account name and address, SKU, quantity, unit and the reporting dates. Inventory on hand and returns are a bonus. Most important is getting the same format every month, on a predictable schedule.
The core fields
- Reporting period (start and end dates)
- Distributor account ID
- Account name and address
- Your product ID and description
- Quantity
- Unit of measure (bottles, physical cases or 9-liter cases)
Nice to have
- Inventory on hand at the distributor
- Returns and credits
- Invoice dates
- Channel: on-premise or off-premise
- The distributor rep on the account
Settle the ground rules
Agree on when a month counts as closed, how corrected files will be labeled, and what "case" means in their export. Those three things prevent most of the confusion later.
A note you can send
"We'd like to use your reporting to plan our account support each month. Could you send a monthly export for our products with account ID, account name and address, SKU, quantity, unit and reporting dates? If inventory and returns are available, those help too. Let us know which fields you can include and when the file usually goes out."
Take what you can get
Some distributors can give you a lot more than others. Start with what they have and note what's missing. A field they can't provide isn't a zero, so don't treat it like one.