Credit recovery used to be the part everyone put off. The money is real — returns your vendors owe you for, product that expired before it sold, promo markdowns a brand agreed to share — but pulling it together meant reports, spreadsheets, and a running list of who owes what. So it slipped. Every month, a little more of it slipped.

Now it's a wizard. You pick a closed month, upload four reports, and the platform builds a Metrc-backed credit memo for every vendor with something owed — drafted, itemized, and waiting in your queue for you to review and send. Start to finish, it's a few minutes at your desk. This post walks through exactly how it works.

The whole thing is six steps

The self-serve generator lives in your ShelfSpace portal under Credits → Generate. It's a guided wizard — the same shape as the one you'd walk through setting up any account, except at the end you have a month of finished credit memos instead of a settings page.

The self-serve generator — six steps from a closed month to a stack of drafted credit memos.

1 & 2 — Pick a month, upload four reports

You start by choosing a month that's already closed. Then you upload four reports, exported straight from Dutchie exactly as they download — no cleanup, no reformatting:

The platform reads each file the moment you drop it in — recognizing it, counting the rows, and checking the date range so you're not accidentally handing it last quarter's data. For the co-marketing math, it cross-references the Metrc sales already synced to your workspace, so below-keystone sales get priced against the regulator's ledger, not a number you typed.

3 — Pre-flight: it checks the files before it touches a dollar

This is the part I'm proudest of. Before anything is written, a read-only pre-flight runs a battery of checks and shows you exactly what it found. It confirms your vendors resolved, your cost data is complete, your Metrc sales cover the period, and — critically — that every file actually belongs to this store and this month. Upload another location's inventory by mistake and it catches it. Hand it a file with no overlap with the month you picked and it won't let the run proceed at all.

Pre-flight is read-only — it validates your files and flags anything worth a second look before a single credit memo is built.

Anything it flags in yellow, you can look at and wave through knowingly — the wizard asks you to check a box confirming you've reviewed the flags and want to build anyway. Anything genuinely wrong, like a file from the wrong month, it blocks outright. You never generate blind.

4 — Map vendors (and it remembers)

Dutchie's brand and distributor names don't always line up with your vendor list one-to-one. When a name doesn't resolve, pre-flight surfaces it and the map step lets you point it at the right vendor — or create a new one inline with a name, email, and state. The best part: every mapping is remembered for next month. Map a brand once, and future runs recognize it automatically. The tool gets faster every cycle.

5 & 6 — Generate, then review in Drafts

Hit generate and the platform runs three passes you can watch in real time: loading your reports, building credit memos, and moving to Drafts for review. It builds one credit memo per vendor, aggregating everything that vendor owes for the month:

A minute or two later — a store with fifty-odd vendors takes about three — every memo is sitting in Credits → Drafts. Nothing has gone to a vendor. There's no ShelfSpace admin in the loop and no queue to wait in. It's your data, your button, your drafts.

Pre-flight writes nothing. Generation writes drafts, not vendor emails. You are always the last set of eyes before a credit memo leaves the building.

Then you send — and ShelfiQ takes the vendor side

Open any draft, spot-check the line items against the Metrc backup, and send it to the vendor. From there it's the standard flow: the vendor gets a clean, co-signable credit memo and three ways to respond — approve, approve a specific amount, or decline — and ShelfiQ answers their questions with the underlying data and carries out whatever they choose.

If a vendor goes quiet, the documented credits don't stall: after the review window closes, returns, destruction, and pre-approved co-marketing move forward — applied automatically for vendors you've set to auto-approve, or staged for your one-click approval otherwise, per vendor. The mechanics of that are covered in what happens when a vendor doesn't respond.

Why self-serve is the point

Credit recovery only works if it actually happens — every month, on time, without waiting on anyone. The moment it depends on a person remembering, or a back-and-forth with a service team, it becomes the thing that slips again. Putting the generator in your hands means the month you just closed is the month you recover, at your desk, on your schedule.

You're not trading control for speed, either. The platform does the grinding part — parsing thousands of rows, pricing every line against Metrc, catching the wrong-store file before it costs you. You do the part that needs judgment: reviewing the drafts and deciding what goes to which vendor. That's the split we believe in across all of ShelfSpace credit recovery — the system does the busy work, you own the relationship.

The best version of a back-office tool is the one you don't have to ask anyone to run. You close the month, you click generate, the credits are drafted. That's it.

Want to see it against your own numbers? Start with a free evaluation — we'll get your workspace connected and run a closed month with you, so the first stack of drafts is real credit dollars sitting in your last 90 days.