Vendor: recovery automation

About this article

This article describes the recovery automation feature of ChannelEngine’s Vendor module.

Table of contents

Introduction

Use cases

Setup

FAQs

Introduction

Over time, you may notice that your vendor operations with Amazon result in numerous invoice shortages and price discrepancies that require your review and consideration. With recovery automation, you can automatically send disputes on eligible invoices to Amazon without needing to review each item manually.

With a few simple settings, you decide for which invoices to start the recovery automation process, when to send your automated disputes, and when to cap the amount of automated recovery requests that you send to Amazon Vendor.

Use cases

You may want to set up an automation schedule for a variety of reasons:

• Focus on historical invoices that may not have been previously disputed or were only disputed once. Note that shortages and price discrepancies from up to 5 years in the past can be disputed (2 years in the United States).
• Automatically re-dispute shortages and price discrepancies that Amazon originally denies.
• Dispute smaller shortages and price discrepancies that add up to significant revenue and often go ignored.

Setup

To set up your automations, go to Vendor, Settings. For each Amazon Vendor channel on which you are active, a dedicated section appears. Navigate to Automations. Here, you decide on your automation schedule: on which days and times of the week to automatically send disputes, the cap on the number of disputes, and the characteristics on which to select invoices for disputes. 

To set up your recovery automation schedule, expand the Automations section.

Click +Add automation and configure the following fields:

• Type - choose the type of dispute that is automated in the schedule.
• Days - the days of the week on which you automatically send disputes to Amazon Vendor. 
• Hour (0-24) - on the 24-hour clock, indicate the hour of the day when the disputes are sent to Amazon Vendor.
• Period - select the period in which the due dates of eligible invoices fall. Recovery automation takes place for invoices whose due dates fall within this period.
• Max disputes - specify the maximum number of times ChannelEngine should send a new dispute for the same invoice.
• Cooldown days - enter the number in days during which ChannelEngine should not retry sending a dispute for an invoice after a previous dispute is resolved on the same invoice.
• Filter - the minimum or maximum value of a recoverable amount that triggers a recovery automation.
• Daily limit - the maximum number of disputes that the given schedule will send to Amazon Vendor over 24 hours.
• Weekly limit - the maximum number of disputes that the given schedule will send to Amazon Vendor over 7 days.
• Enabled - check the box to activate the recovery automation schedule.

General recovery settings

Use general settings to optimize how you send both manual and automated disputes to Amazon in Vendor, Settings. For each Amazon Vendor channel on which you are active, a dedicated section appears that contains three subsections:

• Automations - decide on your automation schedule: on which days and times of the week to automatically send disputes, the cap on the number of disputes, and the characteristics on which to select invoices for disputes. For guidance, check out Vendor: recovery automation.

• Open statements - specify the invoice date range to exclude from both the manual and automated recovery process, for either invoice shortages or price discrepancies. For guidance, check out Vendor: open statements.

• Settings - choose the minimum and maximum invoice ages for the recovery process. For guidance, check out Vendor: recovery settings.

FAQs

Can I still manually dispute shortages and price discrepancies on my invoices if I set up recovery automation?
Yes. You can manually review and send your invoice disputes as normal. Whenever disputes are automatically sent, the statuses of the disputes are updated in the Actions field of the Invoice shortages and/or Price discrepancies overviews.

Is it possible to dispute invoices that fall outside of my recovery automation settings?
Yes, it is possible to still manually investigate and submit disputes for invoices that fall outside of your automation schedule.