Founded by husband and wife team Carla and Rodolfo Bartolucci in 2010, Jovial Foods, which sells gluten-free pasta made from einkorn, was born when their daughter was diagnosed with a gluten sensitivity.
Today, Jovial is a fast-growing, multi-million dollar business with a variety of products, including olive oil and gluten-free snacks, along with their original pasta.
But for Danielle Lisle and the finance team at Jovial, that growth came with its share of frustrations. Danielle joined Jovial in 2019 and is responsible for handling deductions and manufacturer chargebacks (MCBs), a task that involves a huge amount of data gathered from promotions and trades.
“We would get all these checks without knowing if they were accurate or what [promotion] they were tied to,” she says, speaking to her process before the team switched to Vividly. “It was kind of a nightmare. There was so much information and a lot of room for inaccuracies and unauthorized deductions. It was a mess. It really was.”
In 2020, Jovial turned to Vividly to help them dig their way out of their messy deductions process and improve visibility into their trade spend.
For a very small retail brand, having just a couple of people handling a few spreadsheets is usually adequate for managing trade operations. However, with the demand for health-conscious organic foods growing constantly, Jovial found itself scaling up very quickly. For the sales and finance teams, that meant handling a lot more data, trade contracts, promotions, and reports.
As Danielle and her team struggled to match payments with promotions and figure out whether they were getting the money they were owed, Jovial’s Sales team found themselves having to wrangle numerous spreadsheets and data points. Managing deductions effectively soon became a near-impossible task, as the finance team had to constantly check with sales to determine their validity.
A lack of a consistent way to record trade data left room for far too many inaccuracies and unauthorized deductions. Additionally, the teams were only able to organize their data by brand, instead of at the product or SKU level, which meant they only had a high-level view of their performance. Keeping track of deductions ended up being a matter of writing notes on the checks themselves, which was cumbersome and error-prone. There had to be a better and more thorough solution.
“The sales team was working with multiple spreadsheets, while accounts receivable would see the deductions but have no idea exactly what they were for. We would have to ask the sales team every time to make sure the deductions were valid.”
In the summer of 2020, Jovial brought on John Weller, a tech consultant who helped onboard the company onto Vividly.
“Implementation was a very smooth process,” John recalls. “It’s highly structured and well thought out.”
According to John, not only did the Vividly support team ensure a seamless onboarding process, they also proactively suggested ways for Jovial to structure their data that enabled them to get greater visibility into their trade performance.
Once the team was brought up to speed on how Vividly worked, Danielle and her team were quickly able to overcome the problem of inconsistent trade data by bringing it all together under a single environment — no more juggling spreadsheets, no more digging through thousands of lines of data to find what they needed. This allowed the sales and finance teams to base decisions on hard facts and figures, rather than opinions and assumptions.
“The best part is how user-friendly it is,” says Danielle. “We have visibility into all the promotions all in one spot. I didn’t want to have to continue looking at spreadsheets that are impossible to read because they’re 30 lines across and a thousand lines down.”
This increased transparency granted Jovial visibility into which customers were shrinking and which were growing, thus informing larger business decisions around trade spend. By taking the data collected and correlated by Vividly, Jovial could then monetize their data and determine which products were worth promoting with which retailers and which promotions should be scaled back.
For the finance team, Vividly’s deduction management abilities proved especially valuable. Being one of the biggest line items on Jovial’s profit and loss (P&L) statements, the trial-and-error approach to managing deductions meant there were significant financial losses that were often hard to catch.
“Recently, one of our supermarkets fully indulged in an MCB while not actually promoting it in the store,” Danielle says wryly. “They didn't pass the promotion onto their customers as they were supposed to do. The single promotion was to the tune of $16,000 and Vividly made that invalid deduction clearly stand out.”
In fact, thanks to the enhanced visibility provided by Vividly, Danielle estimates that by using Vividly, they’ve been able to identify and recuperate at least $27,000 worth of invalid chargebacks over the past couple of months alone.
Vividly helped Jovial establish greater accountability by keeping a complete and consistent record of all trade deductions. This, in turn, helped Jovial reduce invalid or inappropriate deductions and recuperate thousands of dollars worth of trade expenses – without all the back and forth between sales and finance teams.
“The sales team wanted to know whether they should be reducing or increasing trade spend on individual customers, but they needed a much more powerful tool to justify their decisions. They wanted to take assumptions and beliefs and base them on reality.”
Thanks to Vividly, the finance team could start making more informed budgeting decisions. Sales teams were better equipped to know which promotions to invest in and which ones to scale back on. Having a more consistent and centralized way to manage those deductions proved vital in analyzing the true cost and ROI of their promotions, while also determining the validity of deductions.
The end result is easy access to user-friendly trade reports that the sales and finance teams can collaborate on to make informed decisions concerning trade promotion budgets. Thanks to the greatly enhanced quality of data that comes with having a consistent approach and keeping everything in one place, Jovial can now make smarter business decisions and fight inappropriate chargebacks using hard evidence.
Vividly helps CPG brands like Jovial Foods improve their trade promotion management with smarter deduction management. Built by experts in the CPG industry, Vividly helps CPG companies to more effectively plan trade promotions and forecast sales and revenue. Vividly’s in-depth analytics help businesses drive accountability and make business decisions based on quality data, rather than instinct. Learn more about how Vividly can help you — schedule a demo today!
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