There is money on your vendor statements right now that is already yours.
Not savings you have to go find. Not a price you have to argue down. Money you were owed and never got back.
Think about all the ways a single delivery can leave you owed money. A case comes up short, or a whole pallet never makes it off the truck. The weights don’t match what you’re paying for. Product shows up damaged, or the quality is wrong and it goes back, or it looked fine at the dock and had to be pulled the next morning. You get billed for something that never came at all. Every so often it runs the other way and you get more than the invoice shows, which is its own kind of problem.
Then there is the paper side. The price doesn’t match what you agreed to. An extension is added up wrong, or the invoice is totaled wrong. There’s a freight charge, or a fuel surcharge, or some other fee sitting on the bill that your deal with the vendor said would never be there. And a good share of all of this only surfaces after the driver is gone, so now it’s a pickup request or a credit chased after the fact, on perishable product with a cold chain and return rules that were never built around your schedule.
Every one of those is a credit, or should be. The vendor owes you, and in the moment, most of the time everybody agrees on that.
Then the moment passes.
The delivery gets put away, the shift keeps moving, and everybody assumes the credit will turn up on a statement down the road. That is the part people get backwards. A credit does not just land on a statement on its own. It only gets there after a handful of small steps go right first, and that is where the problem is really born, in the paperwork and the follow-up that has to happen before a statement ever reflects it. Any one of those steps is easy to skip in the rush, and if you skip one, the credit never lands anywhere at all. So it quietly becomes money you handed back to a vendor who already agreed it was yours.
Let me walk you through where these like to hide, because it is messier than it sounds.
Start with the short and the damaged. A case that never came off the truck. A product that arrived broken, thawed, or just wrong, and went back. When your receiver catches it at the door, the right move is to fix it right there, mark it on the invoice and cross off what didn’t come, ideally on a carbon copy so the driver leaves with the same corrected record you keep. That is the clean version, and when it happens, it holds up.
But a lot of it doesn’t get caught at the door. The short turns up while you’re putting the order away and the truck is already gone. My favorite example of all time is avocados. They come in looking perfect, you sign for them, and a day later they cut black. There was nothing to catch at the dock. So now you’re calling for a pickup or chasing a credit instead of handing anything back. The second the driver has left, you are no longer correcting an invoice in the moment. You are opening a separate workflow to chase a credit that has to find its way back to you later, and that is where a lot of these start slipping through.
The billing side is quieter still. None of those charges look like much on a single invoice, which is exactly why they survive, and why the same wrong price or phantom fee can ride along for months until somebody sets the invoice next to what was actually agreed and actually received.
Then there is the one that fools even careful operators. The credit that did get issued, as a credit memo, sitting on the account waiting to be applied against a future invoice. It is real money, it is right there, and it does nothing until somebody uses it. Miss the window and some of them expire. Money you were owed, that the vendor even wrote down, gone because nobody redeemed it.
And here is the part that really complicates it. Every vendor handles credits a little differently.
The big ones send you a statement. Plenty of the small ones can’t. It sounds crazy, but some vendors don’t have a statement to send you at all. So the correction shows up some other way. A handwritten fix on the invoice. A credit scratched onto the next delivery. An adjustment you work out with them over the phone. Sometimes they just ask you to change it on your end, and sometimes they send the driver back for it. Some vendors don’t really issue credits at all, so the only record you get is a memo the driver is supposed to hand you on some later day, which is now one more piece of paper you have to keep track of.
Then there is what happens on your own side. A lot of operators, understandably, just adjust the invoice themselves. The thinking is simple: if I didn’t receive it, I’m not paying for it. And in the moment that feels exactly right. But it quietly creates a different problem, because now your bookkeeper is trying to reconcile against a supplier statement that still shows the original amount. A statement usually lists the invoices and the credits against them, and the hope is the math lines up. Often it doesn’t. Over time the small differences pile into a real gap, and closing it turns into a hunting session back through old files to find where it started.
Now put that next to the volume. This is happening across five, ten, fifteen vendors, hundreds or thousands of deliveries a year, and every location if you run more than one. Claiming a credit is nobody’s actual job, so on a busy statement it is the easiest line to skip. Each one feels too small to chase on the day you see it. I have watched plenty of operators wave off a few dollars as not worth the time. But a few dollars across thousands of transactions and every supplier and every location is not a few dollars anymore. That is the leak, and it is common in this business precisely because it never looks like much in the moment.
So here is the move, and it is less about heroics than about a habit everybody follows.
It starts at the dock, at the moment something changes the amount due. A return, a short, a broken case, a price that doesn’t match, an extension that was added up wrong. Whatever it is, that is the moment to record it. We use one word for this: expected. You are flagging that a credit is expected, right then, because the credit may or may not ever actually come. The job in that moment isn’t to chase it yet. It is to mark the invoice clearly enough that everyone after it knows a credit is owed and what has to happen next.
Because retrieving it is a separate step, and somebody has to own it. Maybe it’s the receiver or the steward, maybe the sous chef or the assistant manager, maybe the GM, maybe the bookkeeper following up from the office. It matters less who it is than that it is actually someone. The supplier has to issue the credit and send it to the right person, and then it has to land on the statement and get applied. A credit you flag but never retrieve doesn’t help you any more than one you never flagged.
And all of it has to be written down somewhere simple that everybody can see. This is where it usually falls apart, because the people who need the information aren’t standing in the building. In a multi-unit, multi-state operation, the accounting team is usually back at headquarters, or remote themselves, nowhere near the loading dock where the problem started. So the flag you put on that invoice has to be reachable from somewhere else, easily, without a phone call and a dig through a drawer. Realistically that means some kind of technology, and the simplest tool that does the job is always the right one. This isn’t about a big system. It’s about one shared, visible record instead of a note on a clipboard only the receiver can find.
The supplier belongs in this too. If you have a sales rep or someone at the vendor who owns your account, they are the person who should be making sure your credits actually process, and they can only do that if they know what you expect. Told clearly, most of them will get in line with it. Left to guess, they won’t.
If you run more than one location, look across all of them at once. One unit is careful about credits and the other never gets to it, and you would never know unless you put the statements side by side. That is usually where the biggest pile is sitting.
None of this is negotiation. You are not asking for a favor or a better deal. You are collecting on money a vendor already told you was yours. That is what makes it the cleanest dollar you will touch all month.
And that is the real point here, the same one under every leak in this series.
This is not a competence problem in your building. Your chef is running the menu. Your manager is running the shift. Nobody is sitting down to read a fifteen-vendor statement in the middle of service, and nobody should have to. Credits go missing because there is no simple, shared process for catching them, no single person with clarity over how it works, and no easy way for everyone touching it to see the same picture.
That is a focus problem, not a people problem. It needs a clear guideline everybody understands, someone who owns it and can walk every person and every supplier through their part, and a simple way to keep it all visible. And it is fixable.
If you do just one thing this week, do this.
Pull last month’s statements from your three biggest vendors. Find every open credit and every one you flagged as expected and never received. Then claim them before Friday.
Three vendors. A few phone calls. Whatever you find is money you can go get back, because it was yours the whole time.
Stay tuned. I’ll be back next week with another place your margin is hiding in plain sight.
John
Behind the Line is for multi-unit operators who’d rather see the leak than chase the symptom. If it’s useful, pass it along to someone who’d nod along.
Related issues
Behind the Line goes out every Tuesday for multi-unit operators who would rather hold the line than explain where the money went.
Want to know what your own numbers look like? ChefMod runs procurement for multi-unit independents: the agreements, the price checks, the receiving discipline, and the weekly numbers underneath all of it.