Every dispensary owner knows the feeling. You're pretty sure your vendors owe you money. You couldn't tell me how much, or which vendors, or whether last month was better than the one before. Credit recovery runs in the dark: you send the memos, some come back approved, and the rest quietly disappears into the gap between "what I'm owed" and "what I actually collected."
The Credit Recovery Scorecard turns the lights on. It's a tab in your ShelfSpace portal, under Credits. It reads every monthly credit memo you've generated and lays your whole recovery program out as four numbers and two charts. Nothing to enter, no report to pull. And across the top, one line that tells you exactly where to push next.
Four numbers, one funnel
Credit recovery is a funnel, and the Scorecard measures every stage of it:
- Credit Identified — everything the engine found you could bill a vendor for: returns, destroyed and expired product, co-marketing, and aging markdowns. This includes an estimate of co-marketing that was never even requested, because the promo wasn't pre-approved.
- Credit Requested — what actually went out the door on credit memos to vendors.
- Credit Approved — what the vendors said yes to, dollars now coming back to you.
- Recovery Rate — approved credit as a share of everything that's been decided. The one number that tells you how the whole program is doing.
Here's what that looks like on a store the Scorecard would flag as leaving money on the table. In this sample view, the engine identified $87,384 in billable credit over the period — of which $22,465 was never requested. The store put $64,918 onto credit memos across 130 vendors, vendors have approved $16,544 so far, and the resulting recovery rate is a low, red 28%.
The number that actually matters: your recovery rate
Of the four, recovery rate is the one to watch. It's approved credit divided by decided credit — and "decided" is the important word. A memo a vendor hasn't answered yet isn't a loss; it's pending. So the rate doesn't punish you for memos still in flight. It answers a clean question: of the credit that's actually been decided, how much did you win?
That's why the Scorecard colors it. Above 60% is green. Between 30% and 60% is amber. Below 30% is red — like the 28% in the sample above. A red rate flags a real problem: somewhere in your funnel, a big pool of credit is being identified and then lost. The next line tells you where.
Where to focus: the line that does the thinking for you
This is the part that makes the Scorecard more than a report. Under the four numbers sits a single Where to focus callout. It looks across your three credit sources — returns and waste, co-marketing, and inventory aging — finds the one leaking the most recoverable credit, and names it, along with the specific move that would plug it.
In the sample, the answer is co-marketing: $65,332 went unrecovered, most of it never billable in the first place because the promotions weren't pre-approved. The fix is concrete — get the vendor's sign-off before the promo runs, and the discount you're eating becomes a credit you can actually collect. But the callout is smart about which lever it hands you. If returns were the leak, it would point you at documenting return reasons in your POS, because only defensible reasons are billable. If aging were the leak, it would tell you to line up price-drop approvals before you mark product down, so the credit survives vendor silence.
A dashboard that only reports is a mirror. The one worth having tells you the single change that recovers the most — and then hands you the button to make it.
Split by source, month over month
The two charts give you the shape of the program over time. Credit Funnel by Month stacks identified against requested against approved, so a growing gap between the light bar and the dark one is a month you left credit on the table. Requested Credit by Source breaks your monthly asks into returns and waste, co-marketing, and inventory aging — so you can see, at a glance, whether one category is quietly carrying (or quietly draining) your recovery.
Below the charts, each source gets its own card with its recovery rate and a small monthly trend, and a detail table lists every month if you want the raw figures. You can scope the whole view to the last month, six months, twelve, a specific quarter, or all time — and filter to a single vendor when you want to see how one brand is really treating you.
What the Scorecard won't do
It's worth being straight about the edges. The Scorecard is a reporting view — it reads the credit memos your monthly recovery already produces and does the math. It doesn't chase a single vendor, and it doesn't recover a dollar on its own. Sending the memos, and letting ShelfiQ run the vendor side, is still the approval workflow doing its job. And it covers your monthly credit recovery program specifically — one-off manual credits and consignment-return credits sit outside it.
What it changes is where your attention goes. Instead of a vague sense that vendors owe you something, you get a number, a trend, and a next move. Run it after each month closes, do the one thing it points at, and watch the rate climb the next time you look.
Want to see your own numbers on it? Start with a free evaluation — we'll connect your workspace, run a recent month with you, and show you exactly where your credit is leaking today. Or read how the memos behind it get built in self-serve credit memo generation.
