The hardest part of any credit program has never been calculating the credit — it's collecting the answer. You send a vendor a request, and then you wait, and follow up, and wait again, and eventually give up on the ones who never reply. ShelfSpace is built to remove that entire grind. Once you send a month's credit memos, the review runs on rails: the vendor has clear options, reminders go out on their own, and a vendor who simply ignores the memo doesn't get to make the credit disappear. This is the after-you-send half of the cycle — the part that decides whether credit recovery is a program or a chore.
Three ways a vendor responds
Every credit memo the vendor receives comes with an email, the PDF with every line and its evidence, and a secure link — no login, no account. From there they have exactly three moves:
- Approve in full. One click and the whole credit is accepted. This is the common outcome for clean, well-documented memos.
- Approve a partial amount. They accept part of the ask at their own number — maybe they agree on the returns but want to talk about a promo line. The memo records what they approved.
- Decline, with a reason. They push back on the memo and the reason comes with it, so you know what to address rather than guessing.
And they don't even have to use the buttons. A vendor can reply to the email in plain English — "approved" or "we'll do $400 of this" — and ShelfiQ reads the reply and books the decision. Meeting vendors where they already are, their inbox, is why they actually respond.
You barely have to chase
Left to a human, follow-up is where credit programs die — nobody has time to nag every vendor every month. So the platform does it. After a memo is sent, automatic reminders go out to a vendor who hasn't responded, spaced so they're a nudge and not a pester. Your team's job during this window is mostly to watch: the Credits page shows which memos are still out, which came back approved, and which need a human. You step in on the exceptions, not the routine.
Deemed approval — the teeth of the program
Here's the mechanism that changes the economics. Once delivery of a credit memo is confirmed, a vendor who stays silent for 10 calendar days has the defensible portion of the memo deemed approved — automatically. Silence stops being a way to make the credit go away.
What deemed approval covers
The word defensible matters: deemed approval only ever books the parts of the memo the vendor can't reasonably dispute — returns, waste, and markdowns they pre-approved. It never force-approves a speculative ask. That's what keeps the mechanism fair enough that vendors accept it as the deal.
And you stay in control of what "approved" does next. Your per-vendor, per-category auto-approval settings decide whether a deemed approval books on its own or parks in your queue for a final click. Tight vendors can book automatically; a relationship you're still calibrating can wait for your eyes. Silence, in either case, is no longer a veto.
When a vendor declines or lowballs
Not every memo comes back a clean yes, and that's fine — the platform gives you room to work it:
- Adjust and re-send when the vendor's right about a line — fix it and the corrected memo goes back out.
- Accept their number when a partial approval is close enough and not worth the friction.
- Open a conversation when it's a real disagreement — the memo stays open, the evidence is right there in the PDF, and you negotiate from documented facts instead of a shouting match.
A credit memo backed by line-item evidence turns "no" into "let's talk about line 3" — which is a conversation you can win.
What this means for your month
- Send the batch, then let the responses come in — most vendors approve without a nudge.
- Watch the Credits page for anything marked declined or needing review; ignore the rest.
- Trust deemed approval to close out the quiet vendors after their window lapses.
- Set your auto-approval preferences so the defensible credits book the way you want them to.
- Work the genuine disagreements from the evidence — never from memory.
The after-you-send phase is where a credit program either compounds or collapses. Built this way, it compounds: clear vendor options, reminders on autopilot, and a deemed-approval floor that means silence pays you instead of costing you. If you'd like to see it run on your own vendors, start with a free evaluation and we'll walk a month end to end.