A special price authorization does not set what the contractor pays. It sets what the branch will eventually have paid, and only once a claim survives scope, expiry and evidence. Revomo holds authorizations, claims and settlements against transactions, computes settled margin, and governs what follows.
A distributor sets its price and is granted its cost, and the two meet only when a claim settles weeks later. Until then the margin is an estimate, wrong in both directions at once.
This is disclosed accounting, not a workaround. Hubbell discloses allowances "based on sales volumes, specific programs and special pricing allowances", as are "customary in the electrical products industry", estimated at shipment to reduce the transaction price.1
Four of those layers have three different owners, and the one that decides the answer settles last.
The manufacturer names an authorized cost, scoped to a customer, a product group and a date range. It never names the sell price. The distributor decides that, and which authorization the line sells against.
Littelfuse, from the other side of the counter: its program lets distributors "debit the Company for the difference between the distributors’ contracted price and a lower price for specific transactions".2
With a healthy authorization, invoice margin understates and the account is over-defended. Where it lapsed, an expected-credit view overstates and the account keeps consuming price. The two errors do not net out.
Counter business is priced off a column in a minute and carries the higher margin. Project business is quoted from a takeoff and carries the authorizations. Most reporting blends them.
Ferguson reports repair and improvement at "approximately two-thirds of our net sales" and new construction "approximately one-third".3
Wire, cable, tube and fittings move with copper while an authorized cost is a fixed number, so a claim that settles in full no longer restores the margin.
Proclamation 10962 put a 50 percent tariff on semi-finished copper and copper derivatives, applying "only to the copper content of articles".4
The base of the price file is not the distributor’s own. It arrives from an industry data service, then takes a multiplier from the distributor, a column from the customer and an authorization from the manufacturer.
Transactions, order pricing, branch columns, and where the change lands. Examples:
The base of the price file, maintained outside the business. Examples:
Transaction and claim history, connected as a source. Examples:
The records that never had a system, and usually decide the answer:
Data is ingested through scheduled connectors into Revomo’s governed store, and governed outputs are written back where transactions occur. Warehouses are sources, not the store of record. Integrations are examples, not a packaged list. Revomo does not file or adjudicate a claim: it holds the records and computes what settled.
The spine forks in the middle: cost and price on one line are decided by two parties on two clocks and reconcile only at settlement. Revomo resolves every analysis and action back to the same records.
An authorization becomes a record with a scope, an expiry and a settlement history rather than a workbook row. The same object holds for one ERP or several across regions and group tiers.
Explore Commercial ContextRanked by how directly the decision moves margin and how quickly a distributor can act. The analysis comes first in each; Revomo appears as the response.
Why it is hardThe claim file is batched by vendor and period; the transaction file is keyed by order and line. Reconciling them is manual, so it happens at vendor level and never at customer level, and profitability stays wrong.
Explore Margin Leakage & Price RealizationWhy it is hardExpiry produces no file and no alarm. A supplier increase has an owner because a document arrives with a date on it. An expiry is found months later, by a denial.
Explore Cost Recovery & RepricingWhy it is hardContractors report that the same material prices better on a quote than at the counter, and that the number can depend on who takes the order. That is what an undocumented precedence chain produces.
Explore Customer-Specific PricingWhy it is hardA job quoted in January ships in September. Cost, authorization and commodity basis have all moved, and whether the release inherits the price is answered informally, at the branch.
Explore Special Pricing & Deal ApprovalsWhy it is hardThey are three different things. A rebate is earned by buying and reduces cost of goods. An authorization credit is earned by selling one line to one customer. Blended, they credit one account twice over.
Explore Customer & Product ProfitabilityWhy it is hardLocal authority is a real advantage here and often deliberate policy: Core & Main’s annual report describes branch managers as having "the autonomy to optimize their product and service offerings". The ERP records who changed the price, not why or until when.
Explore Price Increases That StickThe quarterly register refresh shows 1,240 authorizations reaching expiry in 30 days, covering 8,600 customer-product lines and $28.4M of annualized revenue. The invoice prices those lines at standard cost, and the margin lives in claims that have settled short. Which to renew, which to lapse and reprice, which to hold, before the cost reverts. The scope is one operating company; at a group of several the counts change and the decision does not.
The file lands as a governed dataset rather than a spreadsheet in an inbox, so everything below computes on the same records the business runs on.
The highest credit figure and the most expensive answer. It renews 560 authorizations that produced no settled claim in twelve months, and at 87% modeled acceptance still fails on 161.
Protects more than the blanket renewal on half the requests, because repricing the dormant lines recovers more than their unclaimed credit was worth. It converts credit nobody collected into price, at −0.6% volume.
Right if rep bandwidth is the binding constraint. Wrong if a competitor is already quoting the lapsed accounts: it moves 3,800 lines instead of 2,140 and takes 1.4% of volume.
| Segment | Authorizations | Lines | Move | Recovery | Why this action |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| High claim yield, price-tested | 412 auths | 4,140 | Renew at cost | $1.42M | Settled yield above 96%. The authorization is doing real work. |
| Competitive, contested spec | 128 auths | 1,290 | Renew, ask deeper | $0.44M | Deeper cost is cheaper than losing the release. |
| Project-locked | 80 auths | 610 | Hold to release | $0.25M | Lapsing it breaks a price already committed on a release. |
| Dormant, no settled claim in 12 months | 448 auths | 1,180 | Lapse · +4.1% | $0.24M | The price is already carrying the line. Make it explicit. |
| Dormant, copper-content basis | 112 auths | 960 | Lapse · +5.2% | $0.08M | A list-only move under-recovers. Set on landed basis. |
| Disputed claim history | 60 auths | 420 | Hold · route | $0 | Renewing now buys a claim that will fail the same way. |
| Total | 1,240 authorizations · 8,600 lines · 2,140 repriced | +$2.43M | Annualized, net of modeled volume response | ||
| Rule | When | Then | Approval |
|---|---|---|---|
SPA·SCOPE | Line falls outside the authorization’s customer, product, project or quantity scope | Flag the line and hold it out of the claim set | Auto |
SPA·EXP | Authorization expires within 30 days and settled claim yield ≥ 90% | Queue a renewal request with evidence attached | Auto |
SPA·DORM | No settled claim against this authorization in 12 months | Do not renew. Route the line to a governed price move | Vendor Manager |
SPA·REL | An open project release is quoted against this authorization | Hold cost and price to the release schedule | Auto |
SPA·FLOOR | Settled margin below 15.5% after modeled claim yield | Corridor repair required | Auto |
SPA·CAP | Proposed price move above 6.0% on a line in one event | Block | VP Finance |
The draft was backtested against four quarters of real claims and shadow-run beside the live register before publishing. The rules participate before the action is proposed, so a renewal request arrives having already respected the evidence test and the floor.
The agent reasons. It does not publish. Reasoning does not confer authority: the state change is a governed transition, and policy decides if it is legal.
The authorizations lapse on day 30. Publishing on day 18 gives the counter twelve days on the new number before the cost reverts underneath it. Note what is absent from that list: the manufacturer. Revomo holds the records and computes margin from them. It does not file or adjudicate a claim.
Volume landed at −0.5% against a modeled −0.6%. The $220K gap decomposes to three causes: $124K from the 54 renewals a manufacturer declined on two lines it was consolidating, a supply decision rather than a pricing failure; $61K from nine accounts where a branch honoured the prior number past the effective date, caught in week 9; $35K from two releases that pulled forward under the old authorization, the release lock working.
The next authorization cycle starts with the settled-claim record from this one.
An adoption order, not a catalog. Each tier produces an artefact the next depends on, and the specimen’s proof surfaces sit in the first three.
Nothing above it is trustworthy without it.
Authorizations with scope and expiry, claim and settlement history, releases, columns, customers, products and transactions on one foundation.
Know what the book earned before changing anything.
Margin from invoice through expected credit, never claimed, rejected and aged out, to settled. Claim capture as a rate.
Turn the finding into a publishable change before the cost reverts.
Multipliers, columns, customer pricing and authorization scope on one spine. Corridors as decision tables, explicit precedence, effective dates, backtest and shadow-run, publish path into the ERP.
From what settled to which authorization is worth renewing.
Analysis, predictive and optimization cells with declared state, so the claim-yield model behind a renewal is inspectable.
Objective set on settled margin, with the request budget, evidence test and release locks binding.
Once expiry is governed, watching for it should not be manual.
Expiry monitoring on the register. Live changes still cross a governed transition.
Grounded explanation of why an authorization is recommended for lapse, citing the records it read.
Reach the desks where price is committed and money settles.
The project and bid desk: seller guidance, deal economics, exceptions and approvals.
Committed quote terms and release schedules as entitlements read before publishing, with design partners.
The claim lifecycle itself, held against the transactions it attaches to. The natural centre of gravity in this trade, and last on purpose: the proof above stands on tiers that are not pre-GA.
Commercial change here decomposes into decision systems, so the first step is one measurable problem rather than a pricing programme. Claim capture on the current authorization book is the one we would pick, at fourteen branches or a hundred and forty.
Start with the economic problem. Expand on the same platform.
These four motions all run authorizations, and they weight the same platform very differently.
Revenue arrives in releases against quotes set months earlier, authorizations are written per job, and the bid board is the pipeline.
Margin is made in a minute at the counter, so column integrity and explicit precedence are most of the game.
Few manufacturer relationships, dealer-program tiering, deep seasonality, and transitions that reprice inventory by regulation.
Cost basis is a function of group tier, direct agreement and authorization at once, and no two branches price a customer alike.
Start with a slice of invoices, the authorization register and the claim file. We will map the commercial context, compute claim capture and settled margin on your book, and show how the next expiry cycle becomes a governed decision.
Externally sourced figures on this page, in order of appearance. Every other number is specimen data inside the decision story and is labelled illustrative where it appears.