If you sell through UNFI, KEHE, or major grocery and natural retailers, you have almost certainly seen deductions chip away at your payments. For many CPG and food & beverage brands, retailer deductions quietly become one of the largest — and most preventable — sources of lost margin. Here is a practical guide to understanding them, managing them, and recovering the dollars you are owed.

What are UNFI and KEHE deductions?

A deduction (also called a chargeback) is money a distributor or retailer subtracts from your invoice before paying you. Some are legitimate; many are errors. With distributors like UNFI and KEHE, common deduction types include:

• Shortages & receiving discrepancies — the retailer claims they received fewer units than invoiced.
• Compliance / MCB (manufacturer chargebacks) — penalties for routing, labeling, ASN/EDI, or shipping-window violations.
• Promotional & billbacks — deductions tied to agreed promotions, demos, or new-item slotting.
• Spoils & damages — product returned, damaged, or expired.
• Pricing discrepancies — a mismatch between your invoice price and the price in their system.

Why deductions pile up

Deductions are easy to ignore when you are busy growing. Each one feels small, the paperwork is tedious, and the dispute windows are short. But unmanaged, they compound: invalid deductions go unchallenged, valid ones repeat because no one fixes the root cause, and by the time you look closely, you have written off thousands of dollars of margin you actually earned.

A step-by-step approach to managing deductions

You do not need a huge team to get deductions under control — you need a consistent process:

• 1. Capture everything. Pull deduction detail from each distributor portal regularly and log it in one place, coded by type, retailer, and reason.
• 2. Reconcile against the source. Match each deduction to the PO, BOL, ASN, and invoice so you know what actually shipped and what was agreed.
• 3. Validate. Separate the legitimate deductions (agreed promos, true shortages) from the invalid ones (duplicate, incorrect, or unsupported claims).
• 4. Dispute on time. File backup-supported disputes within each retailer’s deadline — this is where most recovery is won or lost.
• 5. Recover and track. Follow disputes through to repayment and keep a running record of what is recovered.
• 6. Prevent the repeat. Use the patterns in your data to fix the root cause — routing errors, labeling, or pricing mismatches — so the same deductions stop happening.

When to outsource deduction management

Deduction management is detailed, deadline-driven work that rarely fits neatly into a founder’s or a single bookkeeper’s week. If deductions are growing faster than you can reconcile them, if you are missing dispute windows, or if you simply do not have visibility into how much you are losing, it is usually time to bring in a specialist. A dedicated partner pays for itself through the margin they recover and protect.

How Spring Sisters can help

Spring Sisters provides outsourced bookkeeping and CPG deduction management built specifically for food, beverage, and consumer-goods brands. We reconcile, dispute, and recover UNFI, KEHE, and other retailer deductions — and help you fix the patterns behind them — so you keep the margin you earned. Get in touch to see how much you could be recovering.