Money Back on Deductions, Seconds Back on Every Page

🧾 The Thesis: Why Auto-Disputes Belongs Next to Deductions

If you run Cash Application and Deductions in Confido, your deductions already arrive cleaned, classified, and tagged. That work produces a byproduct most brands never act on: a running list of charges that are wrong.

Here is the uncomfortable math. Disputing a deduction by hand costs the same labor whether the charge is $10,000 or $100. So finance teams set a threshold, and everything under it gets written off. The $100 ones add up, and they add up in your retailer's favor, forever.

Auto-Disputes removes the labor. It works off the deduction data you already have, pulls the backup, and files the dispute. Charges individually too small to fight become collectively worth recovering. And it does not start from zero: onboarding includes a lookback that retroactively disputes the invalid deductions still inside the dispute window. The money you already wrote off is the first money it goes after.

That’s why many Confido customers cover the cost of the entire platform on dispute winbacks alone.

💬 Q&A with Confido's Head of BizOps, Keegan

“Everyone tells me plus or minus 5% is good forecast accuracy in CPG. Is better actually realistic, or is that the ceiling?”

It's not the ceiling. A customer who runs their forecasting in Confido told us on a call this week that his forecast came in within 0.3% of actuals over the last ten months. Most teams grind to reach 5% forecast accuracy.

The best forecasts are a mix of accurate inputs and advanced modeling. I think everyone gets how valuable data science and AI models are - but what is often under appreciated is how difficult it is to get accurate inputs from busy sales and marketing teams into the model.

So, how were they able to do this? For one, we have industry leading AI models. But more importantly, their actuals aren't a file someone remembers to upload. Shipments, depletions, and deductions land in Confido because finance already runs its money through it, so the forecast reads from data that stays current without a separate upkeep job, and the system flags the outliers so nobody is hunting for them. Any tool can hold a forecast. One that sits on the data your finance team keeps current anyway is the one still accurate in month ten.

If your team is grinding to stay inside 5%, reach out. Happy to walk you through it.

⚡ This Week, Confido Got Faster

Engineering spent the week on something you feel on every click: speed at scale. The bigger your account, the slower some pages had gotten. Here is what changed.

Trade pages on large accounts. Opening a promotion, loading trade metrics, scanning the accruals table, working the account planner, discontinuing products: each of these was doing the same work over and over. They now do it once. On large accounts, loads dropped from many seconds to under a second.

The cash application check list. Accounts with thousands of checks waited six seconds or more for the list to load. It now loads in well under one.

The demand planning workspace on big catalogs. Selecting items on a large catalog could exhaust browser memory. The page now processes the product list once and shares the work, so the workspace stays responsive at full catalog size.

Bulk forecast work. Accepting a large batch of forecast recommendations now runs the setup once per batch instead of once per recommendation. Processing the largest depletion files went from about a minute to a few seconds. And scenario plan merges that could stall or fail partway on large plans, now complete reliably and fast.

Overnight jobs you never see. The nightly promotion refresh on very large datasets now completes reliably, so your numbers are current when you log in.

The payoff: Your Tuesday just has less waiting in it. And if a page still feels slow on your account, tell your CSM which one. This week is proof the list gets worked.

🔧 Want the Full Change Log?

This newsletter covers the highlights, not everything we ship. Under the hood, product updates land every week: new features, fixes, and the small workflow improvements that never make it into an edition like this one.

Now there's one place to see all of it. We've built a dedicated Change Log page -every front-end feature, with visuals and context, as soon as it goes live.

🎥 Closing the S&OP Loop Webinar

Thilo Hamann, our Director of Demand Planning, and Ben Demers, our Founding Engineer, recently hosted a webinar on the full S&OP cycle and how to close it. See the full recording below!

📅 Where to Find Us

🤝 Confido’s Referral Program

Send us an introduction and receive $1,000 once a meeting is booked. If they close, receive up to 5% of Year 1 ACV.

Know someone who could benefit from Confido? We’d love to connect! ➡️ Submit referrals at the link below: