What Is Trade Promotions Processing?
Trade promotions are a critical part of commercial strategy in the Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) industry. They drive volume, support key account growth and secure retail visibility. But on the back of every promotion lies a complex challenge: trade claims.
Trade claims are deductions submitted by retailers based on promotional agreements. These deductions often reference pricing discounts, display support or marketing activity. Manufacturers, shared services teams and outsourcing partners must then verify whether the claims are valid before approving them for payment.
Across the industry, this process is often slow and resource-heavy. Claims arrive in different formats, with varying levels of documentation. Teams are forced to reconcile data across emails, spreadsheets and systems, often relying on offshore business process outsourcing (BPO) support to handle the volume. This creates long resolution times, inconsistent decision-making and a lack of visibility across regions or partners.
For transformation leaders, service providers and CPG finance teams alike, this creates pressure. Whether the goal is to reduce costs, improve compliance or deliver differentiated offerings, trade claims remain one of the most persistent sources of friction in order-to-cash operations.
Reference: The Reality Behind Every Retail Deduction
What Role Can AI Play?
Artificial Intelligence is redefining how claims are handled across the CPG ecosystem. Instead of requiring manual validation and case-by-case judgement, AI enables high-volume processing, instant decision-making and real-time workflow automation.
AI can ingest claims from multiple sources, interpret their structure and apply business rules to validate each one. Claims that meet pre-set thresholds can be approved automatically. Others can be flagged for action, with full traceability of how decisions were made. Over time, the system learns from past claims, improving performance while ensuring auditability.
This delivers benefits to every type of stakeholder. CPG manufacturers reduce leakage and gain visibility across markets. BPOs and shared services lower delivery costs and move away from FTE-based pricing. Transformation partners can offer automation-driven value with measurable ROI. Regardless of the model, AI enables faster, more accurate processing with reduced operational burden.
Meet Ava: AI That Transforms Claims at Scale
Ava is Aforza’s purpose-built AI for Consumer Goods, designed to solve high-volume challenges like trade claims processing. She brings the intelligence, speed and scale that modern claims operations require. What does that look like?
Ingesting Claim Data at Scale
Ava can consume thousands of claims across multiple formats and sources, structuring them for intelligent processing.
This removes the need for manual data entry or data wrangling, which is often a bottleneck in the process.
By automating ingestion, Ava ensures claims are processed faster and with fewer errors, accelerating time to resolution.
Applying Business Rules & Validation
With a configurable rules engine, Ava checks claims against promotion agreements, proof of performance, delivery records, and pricing terms.
This ensures every claim is validated consistently and in line with commercial policy.
It reduces overpayments and makes the process audit-ready by default, lowering financial leakage and compliance risk.
Making Intelligent Decisions
Each claim is either approved, rejected, or flagged for manual review – with full audit trails and rationale provided.
This speeds up processing while still allowing for human oversight where needed.
It enables teams to trust the outcomes and focus attention only on exceptions, not routine work.
Trigger Workflow Actions
Ava can initiate payments, raise disputes, or notify account managers – all in real time.
This eliminates lag between decision and action, reducing claim cycle times significantly.
Ava improves retailer satisfaction and helps finance teams close the loop faster on outstanding claims.
Learning Over Time
Ava continues to improve by recognising patterns in previously approved claims and refining its validation logic accordingly.
This self-learning loop increases accuracy over time and reduces the need to manually maintain rules.
As Ava gets smarter, the system becomes even more efficient and resilient to changes in commercial conditions.
Ava acts as an automation layer across systems and teams. She can process over 100,000 claims per month, eliminate the need for offshore delivery and reduce claim validation times from 15–30 days to just minutes. She doesn’t just approve or reject claims — she can trigger follow-up actions such as payments or disputes, and does so with a 100% audit trail.
For shared services teams or BPOs, this means fewer FTEs, lower delivery costs and higher margin potential. For CPG finance leaders, Ava brings accuracy, compliance and control. For transformation partners, she offers a clear point of differentiation in competitive pursuits.
Ava has helped CPG organisations cut overpayment errors by up to 80% and generate $2M to $3M in annual savings. She doesn’t just automate claims — she rewrites the economics of how they’re handled.
See the Impact Ava Can Have For Your Business – Today
This simple calculator helps you quantify the financial impact of switching from manual to automated claims handling, including cost reductions, productivity gains and accuracy improvements.
Just enter a few details about your current process and see the results instantly.
Disclaimer: The outputs from this calculator are for illustrative purposes only and are based on the inputs you provide. Actual results may vary depending on your business context and operational environment.
For a comprehensive assessment and to develop a tailored business case, please contact us to schedule a discovery session with our team.
See Ava in Action: Claims Agent Launch Webinar
Discover how Ava is transforming trade claims processing for the world’s leading CPG brands. In this on-demand webinar, you’ll get a firsthand look at Ava’s Claims Agent — from real-time validation to same-day approvals and automated dispute handling.