Staffel — rebate management for wholesale and buying groups

In wholesale and buying groups, the invoice is not the end of a purchase but the beginning. Annual bonuses, tier rebates, advertising allowances and del credere commissions flow back afterwards — often two to five percent of purchase volume, which for a dealer is frequently the entire margin. Someone has to translate the prose of a signed agreement ("from €2.5m net 3%, from €4m 4%, plus 0.5% central listing bonus, advertising allowance against proof") into condition records, keep the running total, and reconcile every supplier credit note against their own calculation. That work lives in an ERP module from 2005, a grown Access tool, and a spreadsheet only one person understands. A tier missed by €120,000 is lost margin that usually surfaces at the audit, not in October when something could still be done about it.

Staffel compiles agreements into executable rules. The signed document — PDF, scan, or an amendment that arrived as an email — is read into a versioned rule set with a clause citation behind every field, and the person responsible confirms or corrects each one before it goes live. The split is deliberate: the language model reads contracts, the calculation is ordinary deterministic code. No number in a settlement is ever produced by a model, and every number can be traced back through the rule and the clause to the document lines it came from. Just as deliberately, Staffel is not an ERP and does not post anything: turnover data goes in as an export, settlement documents come out, and a human decides when a period is final.

From contract prose to a rule that can be executed

An annual agreement goes in and comes back out as fields: reference base, what is deducted from it, whether direct business by member companies counts, tier thresholds and rates, due dates, advance payment rules. Each field carries the sentence it was derived from and a confidence marker, and anything ambiguous is flagged rather than guessed. In the agreement below, the exclusion "drop shipment ex works" is genuinely ambiguous, worth €96,400 of rebate base, and gets routed to a human instead of silently becoming a filter.

The tier position while the year is still running

Once the rules exist, the running position is a by-product. Every supplier shows its purchase volume to date, the tier reached, the accrued rebate, and a year-end projection — including the uncomfortable ones: three suppliers where the next tier is 90 to 140 thousand euros of volume away, and the jump is worth €12,100, €17,500 and €35,000 respectively because the higher rate applies to the full year. That is the difference between administering rebates and steering them.

Settlements you can simulate, and amendments that reach backwards

Period settlements are computed as a visible path: turnover base, deductions, each entitlement with its rate and rule, del credere and central settlement fees, advance payments offset, payable balance. Simulate first, submit for approval second — nothing is written until someone releases it. Retroactive amendments are treated as what they are: the amendment below moved a tier threshold with effect from January, so the periods already settled are recalculated and the difference of €16,730 enters the current settlement as a correction, while the closed settlements stay closed.

Six weeks of reconciliation become a prioritised list

Supplier credit notes — increasingly as XRechnung or ZUGFeRD — are matched automatically against your own calculation. Each difference becomes a clearing case with the position-by-position comparison, a one-sentence hypothesis about the cause, the clause that settles it, and a draft reply you can send. In the case below the supplier left member companies' direct business out of the base, which kept them under a tier threshold and cost half a percentage point on the entire volume.

Where this stands

Staffel is in development. The screens above show the product as it is being built: contract compilation with review, the supplier cockpit, settlement with simulation and retroactive amendments, and clearing cases. Two things make the timing right — the e-invoicing mandate is turning supplier credit notes into structured, machine-readable documents as a side effect, and the international category leaders in rebate management speak neither German contract language nor the specifics of buying groups. We are looking for two or three pilot customers whose real agreements shape the first release.

If you handle conditions and rebate settlement, in a buying group or a specialist wholesaler, talk to us — bring three anonymised agreements and we will show you your own clauses.