What happens today
A deduction is a payment already taken.
When a retailer or distributor short-pays an invoice, the money is gone before anyone reviews it. A deduction for a promotional allowance, a shortage, a compliance chargeback, or a pricing discrepancy lands as a number against the remittance, and the burden is on the supplier to prove it was wrong.
The volume is relentless and the window is short.
A single large retailer can generate hundreds or thousands of deductions a period, each with its own reason code, its own backup, and its own dispute deadline. Miss the window and a valid dispute becomes an unrecoverable write-off, regardless of whether the deduction was ever justified.
Validating one deduction means assembling five documents.
Confirming whether a deduction is valid requires the trade agreement or promotion terms, the purchase order and pricing, the proof of delivery, the proof of performance, and the retailer’s own deduction backup — held across trade, finance, logistics, and the retailer portal.
Invalid deductions are conceded by default.
Because validating and disputing each one is slow manual work against a deadline, teams triage to the largest deductions and let the rest stand. The small ones, taken in volume, become a margin leak no one has the hours to close.
How the architecture runs it
A deduction is money already taken, the volume is relentless, and the dispute window is short — so the small invalid ones get conceded by default. The FLOW assembles the evidence on every deduction, validates it against the trade agreement and the purchase order, and files the disputes with the backup attached before the window closes.
finance sets the reason-code rules that decide a deduction valid, invalid, or short of evidence
which deduction, validated or disputed, on what evidence, against which rule, within which window
What the FLOW does
Trigger on the deduction.
A deduction posted against a remittance, or an ingested chargeback file, starts the FLOW; Connect pulls the line items, the reason codes, and the backup across the vendor portals and internal systems.
Assemble the evidence.
A Digital Task Agent compiles the trade agreement, the purchase order and pricing, the proof of delivery, and the proof of performance into one dispute file, citing each source next to the fact it supports.
Validate against the rule.
Business Context maps the reason code to the contract terms and tests the claim against the agreed trade spend, the pricing, and the shipped quantities, classifying it valid, invalid, or short of evidence.
Post the valid, route the contested.
Valid deductions post to the ledger. A Digital Supervisor routes a contested one to the deductions analyst in the Enterprise Workplace and files the dispute package inside the retailer’s claim window.
Close and recover.
Connect writes the disposition back to finance, submits the evidence pack to the retailer, and tracks recovery to settlement, so a valid claim is not lost to a missed deadline.
What it's worth
Different decision-makers weigh different things.
Here is what this FLOW returns to each.
Invalid deductions are disputed with evidence inside the window, so recovery stops leaking to deadlines no one was watching.
Deductions are validated and routed on a rule, so the queue clears at a predictable rate instead of by manual assembly.
Runs above the finance system and the retailer portals with no migration, and those stay your Systems of Record.
Analysts work contested claims with the evidence pack already built, instead of assembling backup across systems and portals.
Every deduction records how it was decided, against which rule, on what evidence, so recovery rates and disputes are answered from the trail.
Coexistence
How this connects to what you already run.
NEWWORK Connect reads from and writes to the systems that run the business, including ERP, trade and finance, product and packaging, and distribution platforms. Those systems remain your Systems of Record. NEWWORK runs above and between them, which is why a FLOW of this kind can go into production without a migration program standing in front of it.
You can begin with one of these FLOWs, with a Digital Employee owning a single recurring role, with an Enterprise Workplace for one team, or with a complete Business Solution. Any starting point. Any combination. Your way.
Start above your existing systems. Replace selectively when it creates value.
Governed autonomy
Why the record matters as much as the work.
Every FLOW produces one execution record: what happened, in what order, under which policy, by which human or which Digital Task Agent, on what evidence, and with what outcome.
Governed autonomy means the FLOW acts inside limits you set, escalates what it should not decide alone, and leaves a trace of both. The same record answers the trade-spend review, the recall audit, and the launch post-mortem, because it is the record of the work itself rather than a report written about it afterward.
That is what makes work of this kind safe to give to an AI system in a business where a promotion, a recall, and a launch each touch margin, compliance, and a retailer relationship at once. The capability is what makes the pilot worth running. The record is what makes it defensible.
AI-native by architecture. Agentic in execution. Autonomous where governed.
