Deduction & Short-Pay Dispute Tracker
Turn a raw deductions export into a categorized, owner-routed worklist that ages every open short-pay, tracks recovery vs write-off, and forces a manager approval gate before any resolution — recover, write-off, or charge-back — is recorded.
A logged-in web tool where you import your deductions CSV, auto-categorize each short-pay (pricing, shortage, damage, promo) and route it to an owner, work the open-deductions aging, log research and a recommendation, get a manager sign-off on every recover / write-off / charge-back, and export clean resolution entries plus an aging report — with recovery-rate tracking by reason and customer.
Before you start
- A Supabase account (free)
- A Vercel account (free)
- A deductions / short-pay export from your cash-application or AR system (CSV)
- Optional: your reason-code list and a customer master
- Claude Code or any AI coding agent
The problem this kills
Every distribution and CPG AR team knows the slow bleed. A customer pays the invoice short — a few hundred here, a few thousand there — and tacks on a reason code nobody fully trusts: "pricing," "shortage," "damage," an expired promo. Those deductions pile up in a spreadsheet that no one really owns. Some are legit and should be written off. Many are wrong and could be recovered — if anyone had time to research them before the dispute window closes and the money is gone for good.
The trouble is that deductions live everywhere and nowhere: a tab in the cash-app export, an email thread with the customer's deduction team, a note in someone's head. Nobody can see, at a glance, how much is open, how old it is, who owns it, or what your real recovery rate is by reason or by customer. So write-offs get rubber-stamped, winnable disputes age out, and finance has no number to point at. This isn't a discipline problem — it's a missing tool: one shared, aging, owner-routed worklist that turns a wall of short-pays into a recovery pipeline.
What you'll build
A simple internal web app for the people who work deductions. You import your deductions / short-pay CSV (the kind your cash-application tool spits out). The tool standardizes the reason codes into your own clean categories — pricing, shortage, damage, promo, and whatever else you use — ages every open deduction into buckets, and routes each one to an owner to research based on your rules.
Each owner works their queue: they log what they found, attach the backup, and recommend an outcome — recover (bill it back / collect it), write-off (it was valid), or charge-back (push it to the responsible party). The tool watches the clock so disputes don't age past their deadline, and it keeps a live scoreboard of your recovery rate by reason and by customer so you can see which customers and which reason codes are quietly costing you. Before anything is final, a manager has to approve each resolution. Only then does the tool export the resolution entries (recoveries and write-offs) in your AR/GL columns, plus an open-deductions aging report. Nothing posts to your ledger automatically — the tool proposes, a person approves, and your system of record stays the boss.
What's inside the Implementation Plan
The downloadable plan is a step-by-step file you paste into an AI coding agent. It opens by interviewing you about your business — how deductions reach you today, what your cash-app export columns are actually named, the raw reason codes your customers use and how you want them standardized, your aging buckets and dispute deadlines, how you assign owners, and your real edge cases (partial recoveries, repayments, re-deductions, trade-promo claims). It reflects a short tailored spec back to you for a thumbs-up, then shapes the data model, the categories, the routing, and every later step around your answers. You get a tool fitted to your deductions shop — not a generic template.
From there the plan walks the agent through the CSV import (with duplicate guards on deduction ID), the reason-code standardization and auto-categorization, the aging and owner-routing, the research-and-recommend workflow, the manager approval gate, the recovery-rate scoreboard, and clean CSV exports. Every step ends with a ready-to-copy prompt. There's a "No API yet?" path so you can build and run the whole thing today from a cash-app export, no integration required.
The governance it includes (this is the point)
This is built like a real finance tool, not a toy. The plan bakes in login so only your team gets in; row-level security so an analyst only ever sees their own organization's deductions; a complete audit trail of every categorization, research note, recommendation, and decision — who did what, and when; a hard human-in-the-loop approval gate so no recovery, write-off, or charge-back is recorded without a manager's sign-off; and duplicate guards keyed on deduction ID so the same short-pay can't be loaded or worked twice. Nothing writes to your general ledger — the tool proposes, a person approves, and the resolution is carried out in your system of record.
Who it's for
Deductions analysts, AR clerks, cash-application specialists, credit managers, and controllers in distribution and CPG where short-pays are a fact of life. If you can describe how a deduction reaches your team, how you decide who researches it, and who has to approve a write-off, you can build this.
You've got this — start with the plan, paste the first prompt, and you'll be aging and recovering deductions this weekend.