Why You Should Keep a Close Eye on Your Vendor Commissions

Vendor Management System for Higher Education

Every year, colleges and universities around the country struggle with keeping their costs in line. While it may not seem like an obvious solution, auxiliary services can make a significant contribution to your bottom line. Often, schools are paid commissions from sales at retail outlets, vending machines, copy and print services, etc. Every extra dollar that your school makes in auxiliary services is a dollar less than you need from a student. And, as you know, schools need to make the most of revenue of all kinds to help alleviate the pressures of rising tuition.

The Big Problem with Spreadsheets

Given the current financial climate, tracking your vendor commissions via a revenue management system should be an essential part any higher education auxiliary services business plan. Of the schools that try to verify vendor commissions (and many, surprisingly, don’t), most use spreadsheets.

As you can imagine, this is a tedious process: schools get the financial information from the vendor, put it all into a spreadsheet, and assume the commission rate based on the contract. Then, they calculate the commission that’s due.

But, in addition to sometimes changing commission rates, human calculations are often subject to error; vendors could be underpaying you and you don’t even know it!

Another flaw in using spreadsheets is that, although many schools track sales on a per month basis, they may not validate commissions until the end of the year. If you wait that long, chances are you missed money in the previous year (and by that point, there’s not much you can do to remedy the problem).

Ideally, commission tracking should be done as often as you get paid in order to stay up to date and accurate. Notably, in almost all schools that we work with, we found that they had inaccurate commission payments in the past.

Introducing RevenueVision®

Having an automated revenue and contract management system that checks and tracks this information is the ideal alternative to spreadsheet tracking. Our solution, RevenueVision®, is configured based on the financial terms from the actual contracts that your school handles. We review the contracts, enter the financial rules, and then use those rules to validate your payments.

Notably, RevenueVision® almost always finds money, even when schools think they are doing a good job tracking. Imagine how many errors your school may be making… even if they are small errors, these costs can and will quickly add up.

Case Study: State College of Florida

Let’s take a look at how our client from the State College of Florida utilized its data from RevenueVision®:

  • No missed contract expirations, cancellations, or renewal deadlines.
  • Approximately 10 hours of staffing time saved per month.
  • Complete visibility and accountability of their annual contract commitments.
  • Validation of revenue from vendors and adherence to contract terms.
  • Readily accessible, flexible, and accurate ad-hoc reporting and analytics on revenue and operational activity.

For more information on how RevenueVision® can help you use your data to your advantage, feel free to fill out the form below:

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