Running Credit Recovery

Every month, your vendors owe you money — for returns, for waste, for the promotions you ran together. Here's how you turn last month's sales data into a clean stack of credit memos, without touching a single spreadsheet.

Getting paid back by your vendors isn't a research project — it's one repeatable loop you run once a month. You export a few reports from your point-of-sale. You run credit recovery. You review the drafts it builds, one for each vendor, then send them off. Your vendors respond — they approve, or they push back with their side. And the credits they approve come straight off what you already owe them. This is where that loop begins: turning last month's raw sales into a clean set of credit memos.

And all of it starts from one button, right here on your Credits page. No emailing ShelfSpace, no waiting on anyone to run it for you. The moment last month closes, you kick it off yourself.

Click it, and you drop into a guided run. It walks you through every step in order, so you never have to remember the recipe from one month to the next.

It opens by asking one thing — which month are you closing out? Last month is already picked for you, since that's the one whose books just wrapped. That's usually exactly the one you want.

From there, it tells you precisely what to pull from your point-of-sale. Not a vague list — the exact reports, and the exact date range for each one.

Take your returns report. It captures every product a customer brought back last month — the money a vendor owes you for product that didn't work out. And notice it spells out the exact window to export, right down to the day, so you're never guessing.

Alongside it, your discount detail report — every markdown that rang up at the register — plus two inventory reports that carry your costs and today's prices. Four exports in total, each labeled with its own date range. Drag them in exactly as they download; there's no cleanup, and nothing ever leaves your account.

Once your files are in, the wizard does the heavy lifting. It runs a pre-flight check to catch data problems before they cost you. It helps you match any vendor name it doesn't recognize. Then it generates one draft credit memo for every vendor — waiting for you in your drafts.

Here's the discipline built into it. It only asks a vendor for what's genuinely theirs to cover — returns, waste, the promotions and price drops they signed off on, and inventory that aged out below your target margin. The everyday noise — your loyalty program, employee discounts, a one-off markdown nobody agreed to — it leaves off, on purpose. So what lands in front of your vendor is a clean, defensible number they can actually say yes to.

There's one rule worth keeping straight. On consignment, a vendor only gets paid as the product sells, so they already share every discount through their split — which means you only ask them for returns and waste. Co-marketing and aging credits are for wholesale, the product you bought outright. Credit recovery already knows the difference, so it never asks a consignment vendor to cover a promotion or a markdown.

So the whole job on your end comes down to this: export four reports, drop them in, and you're a few clicks from a full set of credit memos — every line backed by your own numbers, not a guess. Run it once a month, and the money your vendors owe you stops slipping through the cracks.