Software for collecting members' revenue declarations

Software for collecting members' revenue declarations does not justify itself on data entry comfort. It justifies itself because collection is the most tedious process a central buying body runs — and above all because what a member declares never quite matches what their supplier invoices. The subject is not the form: it is the gap.

The most tedious process in a buying group

Nothing in a member network consumes as much administrative time as collecting declarations. It is not difficult work, it is chasing work. Every quarter someone at head office opens a tracking sheet, sees that eighteen members out of sixty have replied, sends a first blanket reminder, then a named one, then picks up the phone.

• Files arrive by email, with columns that change from one member to the next and sometimes from one quarter to the next.
• Amounts are sometimes net of tax, sometimes gross, sometimes net of on-invoice discount, with nothing in the file to say which.
• One member declares by supplier, another by brand, a third by product family.
• Corrections arrive afterwards in a second email, occasionally overwriting an entry already consolidated.
• At any given moment nobody knows who has filed, who has filed partially, and who has sent nothing at all.

So the real cost is not the typing: it is the manual rework. Normalising files, recoding supplier labels, rebuilding periods, and deciding without any trace which figure to keep when two sources disagree.

Open, chase, close: treating the campaign as an object

1. 1

   Opening the window

   The period opens on a chosen date with an announced deadline. Each member sees what is expected: which suppliers, which period, which basis for the amounts.

2. 2

   Entry or upload

   Online entry for small volumes, an upload against an imposed template for the rest, and last period's lines carried forward so nobody faces a blank page.

3. 3

   Checks at the point of entry

   Supplier not approved for that period, a zero where there was a figure last quarter, a swing beyond a threshold: the anomaly is raised with the member, not discovered three weeks later at head office.

4. 4

   Automatic reminders

   A prompt before the deadline, one on the deadline, then named chasers to the stragglers. Head office follows a progress board rather than an inbox.

5. 5

   Closing the period

   The period is locked. Later corrections remain possible, but as dated and justified adjustments, never as a silent overwrite.

Emailed spreadsheets versus structured declarations

The real subject is reconciliation, not data entry

Once the declarations are in, the serious work starts. Revenue declared by the member and revenue invoiced by the supplier never match exactly. That is not a defect, it is structural: the two sources measure different things at different moments. A group that automates entry without tackling reconciliation has moved the problem one step along.

Settle the gaps, then lock

Reconciliation is not about making discrepancies disappear, it is about qualifying them. Most are settled by a rule, once and for all; the rest need a human decision, which has to stay attached to the line it concerns.

1. Import supplier returns against the agreed template, with the exact period and scope they cover.
2. Automatic matching of member, supplier and period through a customer-account mapping table maintained inside the tool.
3. Ranking of discrepancies by likely cause and by amount, so the weight is handled first and the rest falls to rules.
4. Arbitration: source retained, amount corrected where needed, reason and author kept with the line.
5. Close the period and pass the base to the rebate calculation, with no re-keying and no intermediate export.

How we deliver this batch

MEKANO is a Lyon-based development studio building the management software of buying groups and member networks. We deliver at a fixed price, in two-week batches, on a Go, React and PostgreSQL stack, and the source code is yours. The declaration module almost always ships with the portal that carries it: declarations cannot be collected without an authenticated space members log into, and a portal without an obligatory process stays empty.

Scoping and the prototype — declaration window, import template, campaign tracking screen on a sample of members — take three weeks and sit between €6,000 and €10,000 excluding VAT. Supplier reconciliation comes in the following batch, once we have seen your real files: that is the only honest way to price it.