There's a moment in the monthly credit cycle that decides how the whole thing feels to your vendors: the review. The platform has already done the heavy lifting — pulled your returns, your waste, your pre-approved promotions and aged markdowns, and turned them into a draft credit memo per vendor. But a draft is exactly that. Nothing has been sent, nothing has been asked for, and no vendor has seen a number. Before any of that happens, the drafts are yours to read. This post walks the Drafts view: what to check on each memo, when to adjust or delete one, what actually happens the moment you send, and why the whole month should go out as a single batch.
Start on the Drafts tab
Everything begins at /retailer/credits, on the Drafts tab. Each row is one vendor's credit memo for the month, built from the data you loaded. This is a review desk, not an outbox — a memo sitting here has touched no one. Your job is to give each one a quick, honest read before it turns into an ask.
What to check on each draft
You don't need to re-audit every line — the point of credit recovery is that the platform already did. But three glances catch almost everything worth catching:
- The total, by source. Each memo breaks down into returns, waste, co-marketing, and aging. A number that's wildly larger or smaller than last month is your cue to look closer — usually it's a real swing in the data, occasionally it's a report that didn't load cleanly.
- The biggest line items. Sort by amount and eyeball the top few. A single oversized return or a promo shortfall that doesn't match a promotion you remember running is exactly the kind of thing you want to catch before the vendor does.
- Anything that looks off, in the PDF. Open the memo's PDF and every line shows its provenance — the sale, return, or destruction it came from, with dates and quantities. That evidence is what makes the ask defensible. If a line can't be explained, it shouldn't be on the memo.
A credit memo you can explain line by line gets approved. One you can't gets argued.
Adjust, delete, or send
Once you've read a draft, you have three moves:
- Send it as-is when the number holds up. This is the common case — a clean draft backed by clean data needs nothing from you but a click.
- Adjust it when a line is wrong or you've agreed something different with the vendor. Editing a draft changes the ask before it ever leaves; the vendor only ever sees the version you send.
- Delete it when a memo shouldn't go out at all — a vendor you've settled with separately, or a month where the data isn't worth an ask. A deleted draft simply never becomes a request.
The rates and thresholds behind these numbers are set once, per vendor, and covered in setting your target margin and coverage rates. If a whole category of credit looks wrong across every draft, the fix is usually a rate, not an edit.
What sending actually does
Sending a credit memo does three things at once. The vendor gets an email announcing it, the PDF with every line and its evidence, and a secure portal link where they can review and respond — no login required. And it starts the review clock: the vendor now has a defined window to approve in full, approve a partial amount, or decline. Silence isn't a veto — once delivery is confirmed, a vendor who says nothing has the defensible portion of the memo deemed approved after the window lapses. Sending is the step that turns a private draft into a live, tracked ask.
The moment you send
Send the month as one batch
Once the drafts are reviewed, send them together. It's tempting to fire each memo off the moment it looks right, but staggering them scatters every vendor's review window across the calendar — reminders and deemed-approval dates land on different days, and month-close turns into a game of tracking who's due when. Send the batch on one day and the windows line up: one wave out, one wave of responses, one clean reconciliation. Batch hygiene is the difference between a credit program that runs on rails and one you're forever chasing.
What to do this month
- Open the Drafts tab and read each memo's total by source — flag anything that swung hard from last month.
- Sort the biggest line items and open the PDF on anything you can't explain from memory.
- Adjust the drafts that need it, delete the ones that shouldn't go out, and leave the clean ones alone.
- Send the whole month in one batch so every review window opens together.
- Then let the responses come in — the vendor's side of the review is covered in what happens when a vendor doesn't respond.
Reviewing drafts is the ten minutes a month that makes every vendor conversation easier. Send numbers you've read and can defend, and approvals follow. If you'd like a hand walking your first batch, start with a free evaluation and we'll run your last month through it together.