Most retailers ask their vendors for credits the same way: a Slack-style email — "hey, we had to discount a bunch of your stuff this month, can you help us out?" Most of the time, that email gets ignored. Or it gets answered six weeks later with "send me the data."

The problem isn't the ask. It's the format. Vendors have AP teams. AP teams pay invoices, not emails. So we built a document that is an invoice — a monthly review with line-item Metrc backup, a partnership framing the vendor's CFO can approve in one read, and a credit memo the vendor's accounting software accepts as-is.

This post walks through a real ShelfSpace monthly review, page by page. The data is from a demo file — made-up retailer, made-up vendor, every Pkg ID starts with 1ADEMO — but the structure is exactly what we send your vendors. Download the full sample (7 pages, PDF) to follow along.

What's in the document

Seven pages, three sections, one credit memo:

The walkthrough — page by page

Page 1 — The cover letter

Frames the review as a working partnership. The retailer explains why they're asking: competing for customer attention, running discounts to keep velocity up, hitting a 50% margin target to keep the doors open. The opening line of the closing paragraph matters most:

"All of this is collaborative — up for discussion, never forced. If anything in the data on the next pages doesn't sit right, reply 'Let's discuss' to the email this came on."

AP teams pay people they want to keep working with. The cover letter sets the tone before any number is shown.

Page 2 — Period summary, top sellers, units sold

The vendor sees their month at a glance: total retail sell-through (in this sample, $38,184 across 75 SKUs carried), top 5 products by revenue, and top 5 by units sold. This is the credit-the-vendor part of the document. They see what's working before they see the ask. Standard "give before you take" structure, applied at the document level instead of the email level.

Page 3 (top) — Inventory turnover

Average shelf age (29 days), median (24 days), share sold within 30 days of receipt (61%), sample size (1,094 sales). The implicit message: cash velocity benefits both of us; here's the proof we deliver it. Vendors who get rotated into stale inventory wholesale don't see this kind of feedback. They notice when they do.

Page 3 (bottom) — Promotions run on your products

Eleven line items in the sample: vendor-specific bundle deals (5-for-$100 carts, $90 ounces) and store-wide promos that swept this vendor in (20% off vapes). A separate footer block lists loyalty, POS adjustments, and employee discounts, clearly labeled not the vendor's responsibility.

That separation is the point. No vendor wants to feel like every internal markdown gets billed back. Drawing the line in the document — this is what we're asking you to share, this is what we're absorbing ourselves — removes the argument before it starts.

Pages 3–4 — Customer returns (vendor-side only)

Nine line items in the sample, $177.26 total. Each row carries the POS SKU, the Metrc SKU, and the Metrc package tag. Reasons are filtered to vendor-side issues only: defective product, customer-unsatisfied, improper hardware. Returns where the customer just changed their mind don't appear here; those are on the retailer.

This is the proof retailers can't fake and vendors can't easily dispute. Metrc is the regulator's ledger. If a return shipped back, there's a transfer record. If there isn't, we don't claim it. (See how credit recovery works for what we cover and what we don't.)

Page 4 — Destruction (Metrc Waste)

Ten line items in the sample, $220.27 total. Same Metrc backup. Products destroyed and recorded as Waste because they expired on the shelf or arrived defective. The vendor's CFO can pull the Metrc Waste report on their side and reconcile every row.

Page 5 — Sales below target margin

Twenty-five products, $1,500 total margin shortfall. The math is concrete: the retailer targets 50¢ on every dollar of sell-through. For these products, the actual margin came in below that — because of vendor-discussed promotions, store-wide promos, or markdowns to move slow-moving stock. The shortfall column is the dollar gap between what the product sold for and what it needed to sell for to hit target.

The credit ask on this category is 50% of the shortfall ($750 in the sample), framed as a shared marketing expense — the billboard split. The retailer absorbs half because they made the pricing decisions; the vendor covers half because the velocity benefits them too.

Page 6 — The credit request

Three lines. Returns at 100% vendor coverage ($177.26). Destruction at 100% ($220.27). Co-marketing at 50% of margin shortfall ($750.00). Total: $1,147.53.

And the soft close: "If anything in the data on the previous pages doesn't sit right, reply 'Let's discuss.'" Disagreement is a workflow, not a fight.

Page 7 — The credit memo

A standalone credit memo (the sample is CM-1042) — issuer, recipient, license numbers, line items, terms, total. Formatted exactly the way an AP department expects. The vendor's accounting team can drop it straight into their books without re-keying anything.

The terms section notes a 14-day vendor review window. If the vendor doesn't object within the window, the credit applies against the vendor's next payment.

Why structured documents get paid where emails don't

Three reasons:

"AP teams pay invoices. They don't pay emails."

What this means for retailers

Most dispensaries leave money on the table every month not because vendors refuse to pay credits, but because nobody asks the right way. The data is sitting in Metrc and the POS. The agreements already exist. The vendors already budget for this. What's missing is the document.

The monthly review is what closes that gap. One PDF per vendor per month, sent on the same cycle, formatted to the standard their AP team already runs. No spreadsheets to chase, no emails to write, no awkward calls about a $200 return from three months ago.

If you're asking your vendors for credits over email, you're not asking. You're hoping.

If you want to see what we'd send your vendors, start with a free evaluation. We connect to your Metrc account, run the data, and show you the credit dollars sitting in your last 90 days. The first month's review is the proof.

Credit recovery runs standalone or pairs with our accounts payable service if you want one team across the full vendor relationship — same Metrc connection, same vendors, same monthly cycle.