Trade Spends 

Use

You maintain trade spends so that you can generate conditions and rebate agreements for the products assigned to a trade promotion. In this manner, you are able to manage the operational elements of the trade promotion, such as how customers benefit from the promotion (through rebates, free goods, and so on) and to what extent.

You cannot maintain trade spends for campaigns, only for trade promotions.

Integration

Maintaining trade spends is a prerequisite for performing volume and trade spend planning. The data displayed for planning purposes is dependent on the trade spends you maintain. For more information, see Volume and Trade Spend Planning.

Prerequisites

You have defined trade spend information in Customizing under Customer Relationship Management ® Marketing Planning and Campaign Management ® Key Figure Planning ® Define Trade Spends for Expected Values.

Features

The fields associated with trade spends include: Spend Type, Spend Category, Spend Method, Discount Method, Related Volume. The data in these fields is arranged hierarchically so that your entries point to one object in the system.

There are two types of trade spends, depending on how the costs associated with the trade spend are to be used:

·        Fixed – The total costs are of a set amount.

·        Variable – The total costs are not defined and depend on the success of the trade promotion. 

Variable costs include the following spend categories:

·        Free Goods – Promotional items that are given to the planning customer. Free goods can be included in shipments and integrated with sales orders.

·        Rebate Agreements – Special discounts granted to the customer depending on the customer’s sales volume within a specific time period. Although you can maintain trade spends for rebate agreements on the mobile client, rebate agreements are not downloaded to Mobile Sales from CRM Enterprise because they do not factor directly into the pricing for customer orders.

·        Discounts – Reduction in the price of goods

Activities

You maintain trade spends in the Marketing/Trade Spends tile set on the Trade Spend Details tile. Here you enter data for the trade spend type, trade spend categories, spend method, and discount method. You can choose spend types based on the tactics of the trade promotion. For the selected spend type, you can allocate the amount of spending in volumes and trade spend planning. For more information, see Volume and Trade Spend Planning in Mobile Sales. You must also maintain dates for the trade spend to define the validity period of the condition.

After you have performed the necessary planning, you return to the Marketing/Trade Spends tile set to set the flag for condition generation for the relevant trade spends. By selecting the Generate Conditions button you trigger the generation of conditions for the trade promotion the next time you synchronize with the server. If you select this button from the Trade Spend Details tile, you generate conditions for the individual trade spend displayed on the tile. If you select the button from the Trade Spends tile, you generate conditions for the entire list of trade spends that is displayed. For more information about how trade spends are used with conditions, see Condition Generation with Mobile Sales. On the Trade Spends tile, the system selects the Cond. Generated checkbox if conditions have already been generated.

Once you have generated conditions, you must generate conditions again for any changes you make to that trade spend. For example, once you have entered a trade spend and generated conditions, you can change the dates of the trade spend, but you must once again generate the conditions by selecting the Generate Conditions button and synchronizing with the server. The conditions are not updated otherwise.

During condition generation, the system also generates rebate agreements. After the generation of conditions and rebate agreements, the status field of the trade spend is set to open. If you now want to settle the payment for the trade spend, then you select the Release for Settlement button and the status changes from Open to To be settled. When the settlement is completed in SAP R/3, then the status changes to Settled.

After you release the trade spend for a rebate agreement for settlement, you can no longer make changes to it.